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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



FOUR PERIODS 



IN THE 



LIFE OF THE CHURCH 



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BY 

HENRY FERGUSON, M. A. 

Northam Professor of History and Political Science 
in Trinity College, Hartford* 



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NEW YORK 
JAMES POTT & COMPANY 
114 Fifth Avenue 
1894 



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Copyrighted 1894. 
By James Pott & Co. 



PREFACE 



The following lectures were delivered in 
Christ Church, Hartford, Conn., in the 
Lent of 1892, and have been printed at the 
suggestion of some of those who heard them 
at that time, and thought them useful. 
They are now presented to a larger audience, 
with some diffidence, but with the hope that 
they may accomplish at least their original 
object of directing the attention of those 
who read them to the wonderful treasury 
of interest and instruction which we possess 
in the history of the Church of Christ. It 
has seemed advisable to preserve the form in 
which they were delivered, as the lectures 
make no pretence to that thoroughness of 
treatment which would enable them to 
claim the title of historical essays, but are 
simply an attempt to give in a brief space 



PREFACE. 

a general view of ecclesiastical history. No 
one can expect or desire originality in an 
historical lecture ; truth, not novelty, must 
be the aim of the speaker ; yet every one has 
a slightly different manner of regarding old 
truths, and it is hoped that old friends will 
not be found to suffer from a new presenta- 
tion. 

The main thought underlying the lectures, 
the only characteristic feature of the treat- 
ment of the subject, is that the Christian 
Church is an organism, and that conse- 
quently, its progress has been conditioned by 
the laws of organic life. It is the hope of the 
author, that what he has written may be of 
use to emphasize the truth, which is perhaps 
the most important of all the many important 
truths in regard to the Church, that it is one 
and the same in all its ages of existence, living 
now by the same Divine Life which inspired 
it at the beginning, filled with the same 
Spirit, and effecting the presence of the same 
Lord ; that it is the same organism to-day 
as in the days of Ignatius or of Augustine, 
of Hildebrand or of Luther and Cranmer : 



PREFACE. 7 

one, in spite of its many apparent divisions ; 
holy, in spite of the errors and frailties of 
men ; catholic or universal, more truly 
now than ever before in all its history; 
apostolic, because the secret of its life, 
now as always, lies in its obedience to its 
original apostolic commission : " Go ye into 
all the world, and preach the Gospel to every 
creature." 

It has seemed inadvisable to add any notes 
or references, as the statements can easily 
be substantiated by any trustworthy ecclesi- 
astical history, and experience has taught the 
author that it is very difficult to secure the 
perusal of anything in fine print. 

With the earnest desire that more and 
more may learn the great attractiveness of 
Church History, these lectures are presented 
as a general introduction to the subject. 

Trinity College, Hartford, 
September, 1894. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST THREE CENTU- 
RIES 11 

LECTURE n. 

THE CHURCH OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE . . 55 

LECTURE III. 
THE CHURCH OF WESTERN EUROPE 105 

LECTURE IV. 
THE REFORMATION IN WESTERN EUROPE . . 153 



LECTURE I. 

THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST THREE 
CENTURIES. 




LECTURE I. 

THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST THREE 
CENTURIES. 



In the narrow limits of four lectures, I can 
attempt nothing more than to indicate in the 
merest outline some of the principal features 
of the life-history of that wonderful organi- 
zation, in which we Christians of to-day are 
joined together with saints, apostles, con- 
fessors, martyrs, in one body, of which the 
head and the life is our Lord Jesus Christ. 

To do more than this would be impossible ; 
the Evangelist himself declares that the 
world would not contain the books that 
might be written of the doings and sayings 
of our Lord alone. Time would fail, indeed, 
to tell of the Gedeons and Baraks and Sam- 
sons of our Christian commonwealth. On 
the other hand, it seems equally impossible 



12 THE CHURCH OF THE 

to condense into such narrow limits even a 
summary of what are the most important 
events of the history of the world, or in so 
short a space to give a general view that 
can be in the least satisfactory or trust- 
worthy. Yet, though much must be sacri- 
ficed, there may be use and benefit even in an 
outline, and though it is a proverb that mis- 
takes are apt to lurk under the shadow of 
generalizations, yet generalizations are neces- 
sary for a complete view of any subject. It 
is possible to exaggerate minute knowledge 
of detail into error ; and when so much 
calls for our attention, it is desirable to dwell 
upon great, distinguishing, characteristic 
features, rather than upon those which, how- 
ever valuable and interesting, are yet subor- 
dinate. For these reasons, and with this 
hope, I shall venture to lay before you a 
general sketch of four important periods in 
Church history. 

1. The Church of the First Three Centu- 
ries. 

2. The Church of the Christian Empire. 

3. The Church of Western Europe. 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 13 

h. The Reformation in the Sixteenth 
Century. 

First in interest and importance, as in 
chronological order, is the history of the 
Church in the early ages of its existence, the 
period of its origin, of its early development, 
of its heroic struggle for life ; persecuted, 
but not forsaken ; cast down, but not de- 
stroyed ; always bearing about in the body 
the dying of the Lord Jesus, and therefore 
manifesting in its mortal flesh the life of 
its immortal King. In this first period it 
will be convenient to make three further 
subdivisions. The age of the apostles natu- 
rally stands alone, distinguished by the per- 
sonal authority of those whom the Lord him- 
self had selected as his agents and ambassa- 
dors, and upon whom special gifts of the Holy 
Ghost were bestowed for their work of laying 
the foundations of the Church. This is, 
properly speaking, the period of origins, and 
our authority for it is contained in those 
books, written by the apostles themselves or 
their companions, which the Church has se- 
lected from all other early writings as espe- 



14 THE CHUBCH OF THE 

daily authoritative. The second subdivision 
comprises the lifetime of those men who im- 
mediately followed the apostles, under whose 
guidance the institutions of the Church were 
developed, the sacred books collected, and the 
general lines of doctrine and practice estab- 
lished. For this period, our authorities are 
fewer in number, and we cannot refer with 
as absolute confidence to them as to the books 
of the New Testament ; yet materials enough 
exist to enable us to form, with a tolerable 
degree of certainty, a conception of its char- 
acter. This is the time of formation and de- 
velopment. It may be roughly said to extend 
to the middle or end of the second century of 
our era. The third subdivision is that of the 
Church in conflict with the heathen world, 
the period of struggle and persecution, ter- 
minated by the final victory of the Christian 
Faith in the beginning of the fourth century. 
For this period our authorities are numerous, 
and we have little difficulty, with their aid, 
in reproducing to our minds the condition of 
the Christian society in its time of severest 
trial. 



FIB8T THREE CENTURIES. 15 

In each of these periods, a great advance 
was made, and a critical step was taken. In 
the first, the Church separated itself distinct- 
ly from Judaism : in the second, it separated 
itself distinctly from the philosophical sys- 
tems of the Gentile mind ; in the third, it 
separated itself distinctly from the social and 
political life of the Eoman world. In each 
period there was a struggle and a progressive 
movement : a struggle against a tendency 
that threatened to cripple and restrict the 
Church, a progress towards a position of 
greater freedom and dignity. In the apos- 
tolic age it was clearly shown that the 
Church was not to be one of the divisions of 
Judaism, but the successor of them all ; in 
the sub-apostolic, that it was not to be one of 
the many schools of religious philosophy, but 
a true religion ; in the third, that it was not 
to be one of the many religions of the Eoman 
world, but the one only faith, the only truth, 
the only religion. 



16 THE CHURCH OF THE 



I. 



The history of the Church begins with the 
day of Pentecost. Our Lord had founded 
his kingdom, had chosen his apostles, and 
had given them their commission while he 
was still with them, but had bidden them 
tarry in Jerusalem until they should be en- 
dued with power from on high to undertake 
the work for which he had selected them. 
When the appointed day arrived, the pro- 
mised Spirit was sent upon them, and the 
work of the Church as an active body at once 
began ; Christian doctrine was proclaimed ; 
converts were received into union with the 
new society by the sacrament of baptism, 
and the organization at once adopted a dis- 
tinct manner of life. What this was, is 
summed up for us in St, Luke's short im- 
pressive sentences : " They continued sted- 
fastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, 
and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. 
And fear came upon every soul : and many 



FIRST THBEE CENTURIES. 17 

wonders and signs were done by the Apostles. 
And all that believed were together, and had 
all things common ; and sold their posses- 
sions and goods, and parted them to all men, 
as every man had need." 

The early persecutions, by the Sadducee 
rulers of the Jews, had only the effect of add- 
ing daily to the disciples multitudes both of 
men and women, a great company even of 
the priests becoming obedient to the faith, 
and of giving to the infant movement the 
support of popular sympathy, especially 
among the party of the Pharisees. The 
rapidly increasing number of the converts, 
most of whom were from the poorer classes, 
led to the necessity of organization in the 
system of distributing the supplies of the 
little community. " There arose a murmur- 
ing of the Grecians against the Hebrews, be- 
cause their widows were neglected in the 
daily ministration." These murmurs were 
the occasion of the first step that is recorded 
towards the formation of a regular ministry, 
the appointment of the seven, to relieve the 

apostles in the work of ministering to the 
2 



18 THE CHURCH OF THE 

temporal necessities of the faithful, and to 
free them for their more especial duty of 
preaching the word of God. 

These seven were chosen from the Hellen- 
ists, or Greek speaking Jews, men of the dis- 
persion, who had been attracted to Jerusalem 
by the Temple services and festivals. They 
were men of devotion and of earnestness, 
"full of the Holy Ghost and of faith," 
natural leaders of their fellows, and we find 
them, at once, active in the defence and pro- 
mulgation of the faith, as well as in their 
more secular duties. The preaching of 
Stephen produced the first severe persecu- 
tion, arousing against the Christians the 
hostility of the Pharisaic party, which till 
then had been friendly towards them ; and 
the persecution had the effect of scattering 
the living fire of Christianity outside the 
limits of Jerusalem. 

Steadily we hear of the enlargement and 
expansion of the Church. First, the Samar- 
itans, hated and despised by the strict Jews 
as schismatics, were brought to the faith by 
the preaching of Philip, who, like Stephen, 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 19 

was one of the seven ; then came the con- 
version and baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, 
probably a proselyte to the Jewish faith, also 
a work of the same spiritual enthusiasm 
which had carried the gospel to Samaria ; 
then the baptism of Cornelius the Eoman 
centurion, a proselyte indeed, but still an 
uncircumcised Gentile ; and finally, at An- 
tioch, the heathen themselves were brought 
to the light of life. The most bitter of all 
the persecutors of the infant Church became 
one of its most earnest adherents ; the Phar- 
isee Saul, who had held the garments of 
those who had stoned Stephen, and had 
breathed out threatenings and slaughter 
against the disciples of the Lord, became 
Paul the apostle, the special messenger of 
Christ to the G-entiles. 

The great change of conception which was 
involved in the admission of the Gentiles into 
the Christian fellowship did not come with- 
out strong and bitter opposition. There was 
a powerful party among the Christians at 
Jerusalem that was made up of converts 
from the Pharisees. These were ready to 



20 THE CHURCH OF THE 

accept Jesus as the Messiah, and believed in 
his resurrection and in his coming again, 
but do not seem to have considered him 
divine, or to have appreciated that his mes- 
sage was for all mankind. Their mental 
horizon was limited by the borders of Pales- 
tine and the requirements of the Mosaic law ; 
if Gentiles wished to share the blessings 
which the Son of David had brought to his 
people, they must make themselves his 
people by submitting to that people's law. 
They had endured the admission of the Sa- 
maritans and the Ethiopian to fellowship 
with them, and had yielded to the divine in- 
timation which had guided the dealings of St. 
Peter with Cornelius, but the proceedings of 
the missionaries at Antioch seemed to them 
utterly without justification. In spite of the 
favorable reports from the messengers whom 
the apostles had sent to inquire into the 
matter, they were shocked and alarmed at 
what was done ; and, acting independently of 
their leaders in the Church, they sent down 
their emissaries, who stirred up bitterness 
and confusion in the little congregation of 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 21 

Gentile Christians in Antioch, and in those 
which had been established by Paul and Bar- 
nabas in the adjacent lands. The question 
was appealed promptly to the apostles and 
elders at Jerusalem, and there settled by a 
wise compromise ; yet, for a long time, this 
spirit of opposition to St. Paul and his work 
survived, and vexed the peace of the Church, 
until, after the awful tragedy of the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem, the few who remained 
unconvinced separated from their brethren, 
and became the founders of one of the first 
heretical sects, the Ebionites. 

The importance of the step that was taken 
at Antioch, and ratified by the apostles at 
Jerusalem, can hardly be over-estimated. 
The Church shook off the grave-clothes with 
which the lovers of a dead past would have 
bound it, and rose to a full consciousness of 
its high mission — to preach to all the world 
the unsearchable riches of Christ. Had the 
opposite counsels prevailed, had the apostles 
been untrue to their commission, unfaithful 
to the Spirit within them, Christianity must 
have sunk to the level of the Jewish sects 



22 THE CHURCH OF THE 

about it, and have perished in the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. The Lord's promise had 
been that the gates of hell should not prevail 
against his Church. This was the first great 
victory, in fulfilment of his word, The 
Church henceforward separated itself defi- 
nitely from the synagogue. It was not to 
be narrowed, but to broaden and extend, un- 
til like the mustard seed of the parable it 
should " shoot out great branches, so that 
the fowls of the air should lodge under the 
shadow of it." 

Of the history of the first Christian mis- 
sions we have only the few typical instances 
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles ; of the 
way in which the Church was elsewhere 
planted and extended, little is known. The 
early missionaries were workers rather than 
writers of history, content, as long as the 
work was done, that their part in it should 
remain unrecorded. We do not even know 
what, or where, were the labors of the 
apostles themselves. Christian tradition 
has preserved the memory of the resting- 
places of but four of them ; and of their work, 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 23 

besides what is recorded in the Acts, we have 
only the slightest fragments of information 
overgrown with legendary embellishment. 
But however it was that the work was done, 
the gospel was preached during their life- 
time in all the principal places of the Roman 
world, and churches were formed in such 
a way as to show agreement among their 
founders in doctrine, organization, and 
practice. 

The early organization of the Church was 
simple, but contained in the germ all those 
features which in the next generation, when 
the personal leadership of the apostles was 
removed, were developed into a definite and 
uniform system of church government. The 
Church did not spring into existence with its 
organization ready made, but, upon princi- 
ples laid down in the lifetime of the apostles, 
which it is not incredible may have been 
suggested by our Lord himself, it formed 
for itself, under the guidance of the Spirit, 
a practical and simple polity, so well adapted 
to its purpose that it has survived the storms 
of eighteen centuries, and testifies to-day, by 



24 THE CHURCH OF THE 

its existence and adaptiveness, to its natural, 
and therefore divine, character. Wherever 
Christianity spread congregations were gath- 
ered together, those in the smaller places 
grouped around larger centres ; organized, 
partly after the pattern of the Jewish syna- 
gogues, partly after the model of charitable 
societies and guilds among the Greeks. Side 
by side, and interchangeable with each other, 
we find in the New Testament the names of 
elders and of bishops, one recalling the syna- 
gogue and the other the guild, and in like 
manner the names of ministers and deacons. 
The name apostle, which had been given by 
our Lord to the twelve whom he had chosen, 
is conferred upon several others besides them, 
such as Matthias, Paul, and Barnabas, and, 
probably also, Epaphroditus, Andronicus, 
and Junia ; while, on the other hand, both 
St. Peter and St. John describe themselves 
by the title presbyter or elder. In the 
interchange of these names we may see a 
picture of the character of the early Church. 
Its heads were apostles — messengers divinely 
sent and commissioned ; they were also 



FIBST THREE CENTURIES. 25 

elders — the natural rulers of their congrega- 
tions, the heirs of all that was best and truest 
in Judaism; they were also overseers or 
bishops — to feed the flock of God committed 
to their charge, thus joining together with the 
ideas of mission and of rulership the func- 
tions of the Greek £m<rxo7rot to administer the 
funds and property of the society for the 
benefit of its members, and to be the friends 
and protectors of the poor. Other names 
appear which failed to become permanent 
titles, such as prophets, evangelists, pastors, 
teachers, helps. * In some churches the 
apostle ruled directly ; in most, however, 
this office was performed by the elder or 
council of elders, who had under them 
several ministers or deacons, while the 
apostles gave a general oversight, besides 
devoting themselves to opening new fields 
of work. 

* The term prophet seems to have been used in a tech- 
nical sense as the name of a particular class of Christian 
teachers, until it became discredited from its abuse by 
the Montanists in the end of the second century. 



26 THE CHURCH OF THE 



II. 



There is danger in breadth as well as in 
narrowness; in liberalism as well as in con- 
servatism ; and in the second period of the 
Church's history it was necessary to struggle 
against a temptation which came from the 
very victory over the cramping and belittling 
spirit of the Judaizing party. In becom- 
ing a Gentile religion, Christianity was ex- 
posed to the inroads of Gentile philosophy. 
As the danger in the first generation had 
been that the Church might be content to 
remain one of several Jewish sects, so, now, 
the danger was that it should become only 
one of the many schools of oriental or Greek 
speculation. Strange travesties of Christian 
doctrine arose, in which the mysteries of 
redemption were mingled with the fancies 
of Greek mystics, and with the wild conjec- 
tures of oriental theosophy. Every fantastic 
belief of the ancient world seemed to hasten 
to welcome the new faith as akin to it, and 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 27 

to endeavor to absorb it, or compel it to join 
in its wild phantasmagoria. Monstrous 
forms of belief arose, in which holy names 
and words were mingled with a mystic jar- 
gon which could never have been intelli- 
gible even to the initiated. This farrago of 
nonsense was boastfully called knowledge, 
Gnosis, and was considered to be the 
quintessence of speculative truth ; while the 
humbler Christians, who were not able to 
attain to its heights, were looked down upon 
as unworthy the attention of the illuminated, 
Its votaries picked and chose among the 
hardly formulated beliefs of the Church, 
rejected or accepted books to suit their own 
arbitrary fancies, and, had they succeeded in 
convincing the common sense of Christianity, 
would have soon explained away the faith 
into a most obscure and profitless philosophy. 
To oppose this tendency was the intellectual 
task of the second generation of Christians ; 
and they did it by opposing, to the false 
knowledge, a true knowledge, based upon the 
simple facts of the faith they had received ; 
to the false philosophy of its votaries, the 



28 THE CHURCH OF THE 

true philosophy of St. John and St. Paul. 
The work was thoroughly done ; and by the 
middle of the second century, a clear line 
had been drawn between profitable study of 
the mysteries of God and the unprofitable 
dreams of conceited and opinionated sophists, 
who were recognized as aliens and, grouped 
together under one convenient title, were 
known as Gnostic heretics. Thus, in the 
sub -apostolic age also, was there an advance 
made and a line of distinction drawn ; and 
Christianity refused to evaporate itself into 
oriental fantasy, as it had refused to burden 
itself with the yoke of the Jewish law. 

The Church was aided in its first struggle 
with heresy by its now completed organiza- 
tion and by the zeal and discrimination 
with which its members collected and used 
the writings of the previous generation. We 
know, it is true, but little about the history 
of the transition from the apostolic Church, 
where the authority was in the hands of the 
apostles, and where few, if any, of them, 
seem to have had special or restricted 
fields of work, to the organic system which 



FIBST THBEE CENTURIES. 29 

succeeded it, with its threefold ministry, and 
its clear differentiation of functions. One 
system, however, succeeds the other without 
a break. Some traces may be found of the 
development even in the apostles' lifetime : 
James, the Lord's brother, held at Jerusalem 
a position closely resembling that of a later 
diocesan bishop ; Paul sent Timothy to 
Ephesus and Titus to Crete, with definite in- 
structions as to rule and government ; and, 
in the Apocalypse, the Seven Churches of 
Asia are addressed in the persons of their 
angels or bishops. Clement, St. Paul's com- 
panion, the earliest of the non-canonical 
writers, and according to tradition bishop 
of Rome, states plainly that the apostles had 
made arrangements in regard to the proper 
succession of the ministry ; and Ignatius of 
Antioch, writing very shortly after the death 
of St. John, represents the episcopal system 
as in full vigor, and urges subordination to 
it, without a word to indicate that the system 
he recommended was new. Before the 
second century had elapsed, we find estab- 
lished in all the churches, in all parts of the 



30 THE CHURCH OF THE 

world, one system, everywhere alike, what- 
ever else might be the local differences, even 
the heretical sects having the same organiza- 
tion. Everywhere we find the bishops, acting 
as the successors of the apostles, ruling the 
Church, ordaining the presbyters, and ad- 
ministering, either personally, or by means 
of their assistants the deacons, the revenues 
that arose from the offerings of the faithful. 
Everywhere also do we find a second order 
of ministry, known as presbyters, whose 
duty it was to minister in religious things 
in the several congregations in the various 
towns ; and a third order, the deacons, who 
were the almoners and aids of the bishops. 
This system was found everywhere, the few 
exceptions which a minute investigation 
with difficulty succeeds in extracting from 
antiquity simply proving the universality of 
the rule. This system was either established 
with the knowledge and approval of the 
apostles, or it was not. If it was not in 
accordance with their instructions, it presents 
the amazing phenomenon of the Church in 
the generation immediately following the 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 31 

apostles, while professing to be guided by 
their teaching and ruled by their example, 
yet casting it aside all over the world at the 
same time, for a new and different organi- 
zation. 

And as everywhere the organization was 
the same in these fundamental points, so 
everywhere was there a general agreement 
in doctrine and in practice. It is true that 
differences arose, from time to time, which 
developed into heresies ; but this very fact 
proves more clearly than anything else, that 
there was a standard of faith from which 
these doctrines differed, and by which opini- 
ons were tested and condemned. Wherever 
a Christian went, all the world over, he 
found himself at home, and among brethren 
of a common faith. So careful were they of 
this standard of faith, the precious deposit 
with which they were entrusted, that it was 
not committed to writing, but taught orally 
to those who were being prepared for baptism. 

Christian theology had come into existence 
at the centres of Christian life and thought, in 
order to controvert the heretical gainsayers, 



32 THE CHURCH OF THE 

but the Church at large was rather practical 
than theological. The Gospels and Epistles 
had been collected, and were respected every- 
where, and were read in public worship to- 
gether with the scriptures of the Old Testa- 
ment. The great act of worship was the 
sacrament of the Lord's Supper, which at 
first was administered at the close of a simple 
feast of brotherly love and fellowship ; but 
at an early date, probably during the life- 
time of the apostles, this practice proved in- 
convenient and inexpedient, and the Agape 
or love feast was separated from the sac- 
ramental meal, which was then administered 
as a distinctly religious act, at the early 
meetings of the faithful held at dawn of 
day. Discipline was maintained by a system 
of public confession and public penance, and 
in serious cases, by the exclusion of the 
offender from the fellowship of the Church. 
Baptism was administered to children as well 
as adults, though at an early date the 
custom grew up of deferring the sacrament 
until late in life, from an exaggerated con- 
ception of the danger of post-baptismal sin. 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 33 

The different churches were in frequent 
communication with one another, and from 
the very first the practice prevailed of giving 
commendatory letters to those who went 
from one church to another. The Christians 
lived simple lives ; they had renounced the 
world ; they looked for the speedy coming 
again of the Lord in judgment, and lived as 
in the expectation of that Day. The joys of 
heaven were constantly before their eyes, 
conceived under somewhat material imagery 
— as were also the pains of hell — and in both 
they believed most literally and fervently. 
By the end of the second century, the empire 
was filled with Christian congregations, in 
every place of importance, and in many 
remote country districts as well ; and it was 
the proud boast of Tertullian, that tribes 
that had repelled the Eoman legions, 
countries inaccessible to the Eoman eagles, 
had been invaded and conquered by the 
soldiers of Christ. "Camp, forum, city, 
market-place, and country village," he cries, 
"we fill them all ; we leave you your tem- 
ples only ! " 



34 THE CHURCH OF THE 



III. 



As the number of believers increased, it 
was inevitable that they should come into 
conflict with the civil society in which they 
lived. They were in the midst of a world 
in which the practice of idolatry entered into 
every action of daily life and colored the 
whole habit of thought. At first, the toler- 
ant system of the Roman state religion saw 
in them only either a sect of the Jews, more 
scrupulous and more perverse than common, 
or a new form of philosophy, more irrational 
than the others, and treated them with a 
careless contempt. There is no reason to 
believe that either Nero or Domitian perse- 
cuted the Christians as Christians. They 
dealt with them as more objectionable than 
the other Jews, and attributed to them a 
gloomy unsociability and a perverse super- 
stition that inspired them with hatred of the 
human race. Soon, however, the increasing 
numbers of the Christians and the antipathy 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 35 

shown to them by the Jews, called them to 
the attention of the Roman officials in the 
provinces, especially in Asia Minor. The 
temples were deserted, they complained, the 
sacrifices neglected, and this new sect was 
beginning to enter into conflict with the 
time-honored customs of the empire. The 
Roman law was very severe in regard to 
unlicensed organizations, and it was as such 
that the Christian communities were con- 
sidered. There is a most interesting corre- 
spondence preserved, between the younger 
Pliny, who was governor of Bithynia, and 
the Emperor Trajan, which gives us a 
picture of the life of the Church in the 
beginning of the second century. Pliny 
writes, that he found on investigation that 
the Christians met together before daybreak, 
and sang hymns to Christ as God, and then 
bound themselves by a sacramental oath 
to do no wrong. Neither torture nor any 
other compulsion could extort any confession 
of wrong-doing, and he writes in perplexity 
to the Emperor to know how such cases were 
to be treated. The policy suggested by 



36 THE CHURCH OF THE 

Trajan was that which was generally followed 
for more than a hundred years : if the 
Christians were quiet, they were not to be 
molested nor their organization investigated; 
but if complaint was made and they persisted 
in their obstinacy, they were to be punished. 
Their offence was in presuming to differ 
from the practice of the world, in condemn- 
ing the life of the world about them, and in 
organizing themselves into a secret society.* 

* Some recent writers, notably Professor Ramsay, in 
his most scholarly and scientific " Church in the Roman 
Empire," are inclined to maintain that, from almost the 
first, the Empire was hostile to the rising Christian body, 
as such. They therefore hold that, in the rescript of 
Trajan, we have, not the first official statement of im- 
perial policy, but what was in reality a relaxation of the 
severity which had prevailed under previous law. Mr. 
Ramsay maintains this view with great learning and 
Ingenuity, but seems to rate less highly than it deserves, 
the testimony of Tertullian, who, though somewhat later, 
is a well-informed and capable witness. Now, Tertullian 
certainly did not consider that the policy enunciated by 
Trajan was any relaxation of the law, or anything of the 
nature of a modus Vivendi, but is very severe in his 
condemnation of the Emperor, for what he considers 
illogical and inequitable conclusions. 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 37 

But as time went on the differences between 
them and their neighbors became more 
strongly marked, and the popular antipathy 
to the unsocial Christians, who hated as was 
supposed all the rest of mankind, increased 
apace and became a source of danger even 
greater than the penalties of the law. Did 
the Nile refuse to rise high enough to fertil- 
ize the plains of Egypt, or did the Tiber rise 
too high and flood the low-lying quarters of 
the city, the cry of the mob was the same — 
" The Christians are to blame ! the Christians 
to the lions ! " Popularity-seeking governors 
would gratify their people by dragging to the 
altars the hated Christians, and offering them 
the alternative of sacrifice or death. In the 
reign of the philosophic Marcus Aurelius, the 
best of all the Emperors, Polycarp, Aa D# 
the aged bishop of Smyrna, was 161 - 180 - 
brought to the stake and there " played 
the man " before the proconsul of Asia. The 
same reign saw the awful sufferings of the 
martyrs at Vienne in Gaul, who died deaths 
of fearful torment rather than deny their 



38 THE CHURCH OF THE 

Lord. But down to the time of the Em- 
A. D. peror Decius, in the third century, 
249-251. th ere was no general persecution, in 
which the Eoman imperial power as such was 
directed against the Church as such. Christ- 
ians indeed were often persecuted, and were 
often called upon to testify to their Master by 
a martyr's death, but the danger was rather 
from the people among whom they lived, than 
from the rulers of the land. 

It was not an easy thing to be a Christian 
then, even though general persecution had 
not as yet begun, for the spirit of Chris- 
tianity was diametrically opposed to the life 
of the Eoman world. The characteristic 
features of that life were carelessness and 
indifference both in religion and in morality. 
The Roman Empire knew no religion but 
that of the gods of the state, chief among 
which was the deified imperial power, but it 
tolerated contemptuously all sorts of faiths 
and beliefs, as long as they did not come in 
any way in conflict with its authority. 
Christianity might have had this toleration 
if the Christians had been willing to accept 



FIEST THREE CENTURIES. 39 

it, or willing to admit that their religion was 
on an equality with the many worships 
which surrounded them, and bow their head 
before the supreme divinity of Caesar. But 
from the very first we find the Church with- 
out hesitation assuming the position that it 
alone possessed the truth and had a mes- 
sage to all mankind. Between two such 
positions, each of the bodies claiming uni- 
versal authority, and demanding absolute 
submission, there was no possibility of recon- 
ciliation and compromise. No man could 
worship Christ and adore the Genius of Caesar 
at the same time ; and the Christian disci- 
pline, which forbade its members joining in 
the games and festivals which were so closely 
interwoven with all the life of the heathen, 
separated them distinctly from the world in 
which they lived, a world which they be- 
lieved, and not without reason, was doomed 
to perdition. As a rule, the Christians did 
not court martyrdom, believing that our Lord 
had forbidden such action, but at a very 
early date a belief arose of the value of mar- 
tyrdom as an offering to God, and of the 



40 THE CHUBCB OF THE 

wonderful blessing of thus winning heaven 
by a few sharp hours of suffering ; and 
zealots were found who rushed upon their 
fate, and goaded by insults even unwilling 
magistrates into persecution, hoping to wash 
away in their own blood the stains their 
souls had contracted. But, though there 
was some extravagance, Christian history 
and tradition is full of the most pathetic 
accounts of heroic constancy in the face of 
awful suffering, where weak women and 
children became strong in the might of the 
Master whom they served, and overcame by 
"his blood, and by the word of his testi- 
mony, and they loved not their lives unto 
the death.' 5 

Few passages in any literature are more 
inspiring or more touching than the letter 
from the Christians in Smyrna telling of 
the martyrdom of Poly carp, or the simple 
narrative of the martyrs of Carthage con- 
tained in the Acts of Perpetua and Felicitas. 
The aged bishop, the noble Eoman matron, 
the humble slave-girl, the boy catechumen, 
all faced death and tortures with the same 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 41 

patience and the same triumphant gladness 
that they had been found worthy to seal 
their confession with their blood. 

When at last the storm of general persecu- 
tion broke, it broke with force all the greater 
because it had been so long preparing and 
because the Christians had become numerous 
enough to be feared as well as detested. The 
emperor Decius was called to the throne in a 
moment of the greatest danger to the empire. 
Wild hordes of Germanic peoples, a. D. 
long the most dreaded enemies of 249# 
Rome, hosts of Goths and Franks, had entered 
the provinces and were threatening the civil- 
ized world with destruction. In their extrem- 
ity the Romans turned to religion, which for 
ages had been little more than a formality 
of state. They believed the gods were angry 
at the impiety of the people, and that they 
were showing their wrath upon the empire. 
The temples were once more thronged with 
eager worshippers, and all over the empire 
an attempt was made to compel the Chris- 
tians to forsake their faith. The blows fell 
with the greatest severity upon the leaders 



42 THE CHURCH OF THE 

of the Church, who were sought out and pun- 
ished as the chief offenders, and for several 
years the persecution raged, during the life- 
time of Decius and his successors, Gallus, 
A# d # JEmilian, and Valerian. The strain 
251-260. was ver y severe ^ an d told upon the 

Church. It drove from it many who had 
become Christians from taste rather than 
from conviction, and it destroyed many of the 
most prominent of the leaders. But the great 
majority of the Christians were constant in 
their faith; and after the rage of persecution 
was spent, the Church arose all the stronger 
for the contest. For forty years it was un- 
molested, and in fact is said to have received 
legal recognition as an allowed religion ; and 
in this period of peace the number and in- 
fluence of its members increased rapidly. 
Once more, however, came a period of trial 
and of persecution, and this time the most 
widespread and severe of all. In the civil 
disturbances at the beginning of the fourth 
century, hostile measures against Chris- 
tianity were again undertaken. The empire 
at last recognized fully the problem that 



FIRST THBEE CENTURIES. 43 

was presented to it by the existence within its 
limits of a society whose members owed alle- 
giance to another Lord, and directed all its 
forces, not now to frighten Christians into 
conformity, but to extirpate the very name 
of Christianity. The Diocletian a. d. 
persecution struck at laity as well as 303, 
clergy, low as well as high, youths and women 
as well as men. All over the empire it raged 
for seven or eight years ; churches were de- 
stroyed, thousands of martyrs suffered, and 
the sacred books were sought for and burned 
with bitter malignity, until at last the triumph 
of Constantine put an end to the persecution. 
It was believed by the exulting Christians 
that on the eve of his most serious battle, on 
which his fate and that of the empire de- 
pended, the Emperor had seen in the sky the 
figure of a cross formed by the initial letters 
of the Saviour's name, and underneath the 
words Toy™ vUa. " By this conquer. " Impressed 
by the vision, he ordered the Labarum, 
or cross-bearing standard, to replace the 
Eagles ; and when victory was his, a. D. 
with his associate Licinius, he issued 313# 



44 THE CHURCH OF THE 

the edict of toleration that gave peace to 
the bleeding Church. 

Wonderful triumph of faith and constancy ! 
The little one had become a thousand, and the 
small one a strong nation. The Christian 
Church had kept the faith and had overcome. 
It had refused to be a Jewish sect ; it had 
refused to be an oriental philosophy ; it had 
refused to receive the toleration of the state 
as one of many religions of the Roman world. 
Convinced of its divine mission, full of its 
precious message for mankind, it had kept 
steadily in its appointed path, undeterred by 
opposition, by ridicule, or by violence, and 
now God had given the victory. The new 
and heavenly Jerusalem saw now the children 
of those who had afflicted her come bending 
unto her, and heard the name of her God, 
which men had despised, now honored and 
revered. It is one of those stupendous events 
in history which are inexplicable by purely 
earthly considerations ; a witness beyond all 
controversy of the ruling and guiding hand 
of God. 

Into the story of the Church's triumph I 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 45 

shall not enter ; my subject to-day is rather 
of the struggle than of the victory, of the 
prayers of sadness rather than of the hymns 
of praise. There is no history so stimulating, 
no record of human events so noble, so little 
alloyed with frailty, weakness, or self-seek- 
ing, as is the tale of constant endurance and 
patience and faith and hope, that is told us 
in the story of the first three centuries. This 
is the heroic age of Christianity, the true 
romance of history ; and it is most surpris- 
ing that it is so little studied by Christian 
people, and that they are content to be 
unfamiliar themselves, and to allow their 
children to be unfamiliar, with the mighty 
deeds of our Christian worthies, who 
" wrought righteousness, obtained prom- 
ises, stopped the mouths of lions, out of weak- 
ness were made strong, waxed valiant in 
fight, turned to flight the armies of the 
aliens." There are few more impressive 
places in the world than the great Flavian 
amphitheatre in the city of Eome, conse- 
crated to the worship of God, as its proud 
inscription reads, by the blood of the martyrs 



46 THE CHURCH OF THE 

shed within its walls. It has witnessed the 
most sublime, though the most cruel, scenes 
in human history. There the aged Ignatius, 
bishop of Antioch, second from the Apostle's 
time, was, as he himself phrased it in the 
striking metaphor, " ground fine beneath 
the teeth of the lions that he might be choice 
flour for his Master's granary." There those 
of whom the world was not worthy faced 
calmly the most horrible of deaths, and the 
still more horrible hatred that they could see 
upon the unpitying faces of Eoman maidens 
and matrons, who came to see Christian 
maidens and matrons torn to pieces by wild 
beasts for their diversion. The noble hero- 
ism of the aged Polycarp at Smyrna, the 
constancy amid excruciating tortures of the 
martyrs of Vienne, the simplicity and sweet- 
ness of the faith of Perpetua and Felicitas, 
the manly fidelity of Lawrence, the dignified 
and triumphant death of Cyprian, all these 
and many others should be as familiar to 
Christians of to-day as the stories of their 
own land. Our heavenly commonwealth has 
its patriots as well as our earthly country, 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 47 

whose example may stimulate our weakness 
and shame our indifference. So, also, does 
it possess its statesmen, its great thinkers and 
writers, who have shaped the form of human 
thought, and by their clearness of mental 
vision have influenced profoundly the subse- 
quent opinions of mankind. There are Justin 
Martyr and the other apologists, the first 
formal defenders of Christianity by written 
argument ; there is Irenseus, the great theolo- 
gian of Lyons, the bulwark of the Church 
against the follies of the Gnostics ; there is 
that wonderful school of Christian philosophy 
at Alexandria, whose leaders, Clement and 
Origen, were the creators of Christian meta- 
physical thought ; there is Tertullian, the stern 
critic of his weaker brothers, the puritan of 
the early Church, like modern puritans car- 
ried by the severity of his temper into separa- 
tion, yet without leaving hold of the great 
verities of the faith ; there is Cyprian, the 
great bishop of Carthage, who has left us his 
remarkable treatise upon the Unity of the 
Church, and who fought out in his day ques- 
tions which still arise from time to time. The 



48 



THE CHURCH OF THE 



literature of these centuries is indeed remark- 
able, both in its amount and in its breadth 
of thought. We need not expect to find it 
always sternly logical according to the formal 
laws of reasoning. There is a directer logic 
of which the Fathers were masters, the logic 
of the heart rather than of the head. Their 
methods of reasoning were at least better 
than those of their opponents, and their 
cause was better ; and if in our conceit we 
sometimes smile at their argumentative 
fallacies, the simplicity and reality of their 
faith should bring us to our knees. 

It is not necessary to enter into any dis- 
cussion of early heresies and errors. There 
are none of them that have more than a 
historical interest, except as showing how in 
all ages the tendencies of error are alike. 
With the exception of one or two that arose 
over questions of discipline, they were rather 
travesties of Christianity than forms of Chris- 
tianity. 

Thus we may see how the Church grew, 
from the few disciples in the upper room 
to the time of her final triumph under Con- 



FIBST THREE CENTURIES. 49 

stantine, by a natural process of growth, by 
the development of the divine life which it 
had received at the beginning. This develop- 
ment, like all development, was by a constant 
process of differentiation and specialization. 
In the first period, the Church was clearly 
separated from Judaism ; in the second period, 
from the Greek and oriental philosophies ; 
in the third period, from the religions of the 
Eoman world. At first, its enemies were the 
Jews alone ; then Jews and philosophers 
both; at last, all the powers of the earth. 
The organization of the Church was also 
a development, under the guidance of the 
Apostles and their followers, from the simple 
almost unorganized condition of the first 
little community in Jerusalem, to the com- 
pleted episcopal system which was to be found 
everywhere by the middle of the second cen- 
tury. The doctrine of the Church was main- 
tained by its organization. From the very 
beginning the Church has been the witness 
and keeper of Holy Writ. To the men of the 
second and third centuries we owe an immense 

debt of gratitude for their inestimable ser- 
4 



50 THE CHURCH OF THE 

vices in collecting and editing the scriptures 
of the New Testament. With a wonderful in- 
tuition, most amazing in such an uncritical 
age, they selected from the mass of writings, 
the books which best deserved the considera- 
tion of Christians, recognized their divine 
character, and established at once the prac- 
tice, so indispensable to the Church, of read- 
ing them regularly as a part of their public 
services. This gave the early Christians a 
wonderful familiarity with the words of the 
New Testament, which entered into their 
daily life and formed part of their daily 
speech ; so that it has often been remarked, 
that should the copies of the Gospels have 
been lost, they might have been in great 
measure replaced from the quotations in the 
works of the early Fathers. By the divine 
guidance the Church was led safely and tri- 
umphantly through the first ages of its ex- 
istence. The great first steps were taken, 
never to be repeated ; the character was 
formed, never to be completely changed. 
Upon the one foundation that had been laid 
once for all, wise master-builders had reared 



FIRST THREE CENTURIES. 51 

the walls of the temple of God, and when the 
time of trial came, their work was made 
manifest, and the day declared it, because 
it was revealed in fire ; and as the apostle 
had foretold the fire of persecution proved 
the abiding and immortal character of the 
structure they had reared. 



LECTURE II. 
THE CHURCH OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 



LECTURE II. 

THE CHURCH OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 

There is always some disappointment even 
in the greatest triumphs ; the attainment is 
never quite equal to the anticipation. The 
history of the Christian Church in its hour 
of victory forms no exception to this general 
rule. As a great modern writer has said : 
"This is a world of conflict, and of vicissi- 
tude amid the conflict. The Church is ever 
militant ; sometimes she gains, sometimes 
she loses ; and more often she is at once gain- 
ing and losing in different parts of her ter- 
ritory. What is Ecclesiastical History but a 
record of the ever-doubtful fortunes of the 
battle, though its issue is not doubtful ? 
Scarcely are we singing Te Deum, when we 
have to turn to our Misereres : scarcely are 

we in peace, when we are in persecution : 

65 



56 THE CHURCH OF THE 

scarcely have we gained a triumph, when 
we are visited by a scandal. Nay, we make 
progress by means of reverses ; our griefs are 
our consolations ; we lose Stephen to gain 
Paul, and Matthias replaces the traitor 
Judas."* 

The seeming success of Christianity was 
accompanied by serious corruption both in 
faith and practice ; its gains in numbers and 
in power were at the expense of much of its 
ancient strictness of discipline and simplicity 
of life and worship. Its history is not as in- 
spiring as that of the first three centuries ; 
there is much more to tell of error and weak- 
ness, of sin and of folly, than in those early 
ages of heroic contest. The Church had 
passed the period of its childhood, with its 
simple virtues and simple faults ; the errors 
of its adolescence are more repellent, its very 
virtues less attractive, than those of its early 
days. 

Yet it would be a great mistake to fancy 
that this was a period of apostasy, or devoid 
of much that was true and noble. As in 

* Newman, Historical Sketches, III. 1, 2. 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 57 

the times of persecution the violence of the 
world had failed to overcome the heroic re- 
sistance of Christ's soldiers and servants ; so 
now, in spite of the more insidious tempta- 
tions of prosperity, the Church maintained 
the faith and held up a standard of morality 
incomparably purer than that of the world 
about it. If the virtues of Christians do not 
shine with the transcendent brightness that 
they did at first, it must be remembered that 
the background against which they appear 
is not the utter darkness of heathenism, but 
the half light of a general if imperfect ac- 
ceptance of the principles of Christianity. 
The very fact that the general average was 
higher, will explain why the contrasts are 
less strongly marked. 

In the age of the Christian empire may 
properly be included those centuries in which 
the empire was still the dominant world- 
power, before the Germanic tribes in the 
West, and Avars, Slavs, Bulgarians, and 
Arabs in the East, had broken up the time- 
honored unity of law and order which had 
been the gift of the Caesars to the world. 



58 THE CHURCH OF THE 

In the West the catastrophe came in the 
fifth century, and although in the sixth 
century Africa and Italy were for a time 
recovered, the unity was never that of the 
former undivided empire. In the East the 
process of destruction was more gradual, but 
by the middle of the eighth century little 
was left to the empire beside a narrow fringe 
of coast around the Balkan peninsula and a 
few Greek towns in Asia Minor which were 
still able to hold out against all-conquering 
Islam. The principal ecclesiastical events of 
the period, both in East and West, may be 
included in the limits of two centuries from 
the time of the conversion of Constantine. 
After that time the Eastern Church almost 
ceases to have a history ; and though the his- 
tory of the Church in the West is full of 
interest and importance, its characteristic 
features are so distinct that it needs to be 
considered by itself. 

In this period, as in the preceding, we may 
see great dangers resisted and great advances 
made ; but the dangers, instead of being suc- 
cessive, were simultaneous, and the progress 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 59 

made became in its turn the cause of further 
dangers and difficulties against which Chris- 
tianity is still struggling. The dangers arose 
from two sources, the connection of the State 
with the Church and the popularizing of 
Christianity. They assailed the Church in 
its faith ; and were met by the great ecu- 
menical councils with carefully prepared 
definitions of Christian beliefs. They as- 
sailed the Church in its morals ; and were 
met and resisted by the growth of asceticism. 
They assailed the Church's liberty and inde- 
pendence of action ; and were met by the de- 
termined resistance of the prelates. Pro- 
gress was made in definiteness of theological 
conception ; in the standard of life main- 
tained by the best and noblest of the age ; 
and in the realization of the supreme dignity 
and honor of the Church's position. Yet 
definitions and creed-making tended to set 
theology above religion in the Christian con- 
sciousness ; ascetic virtues led to the irra- 
tional vagaries of monasticism ; and spiritual 
independence, when not crushed out as in the 
East, was perverted into ecclesiastical domi- 



60 THE CHURCH OF THE 

nation, culminating in the claims to absolute 
supremacy of the western papacy. 

It is a confusing period to study, especially 
in the early and the later portions, as changes 
take place with such rapidity that it is like 
watching the bewildering variations of the 
kaleidoscope. It is full of great men, those 
most disturbing elements in historic general- 
izations, who do not move according to one's 
preconceived ideas and constantly compel 
one to throw aside some most alluring gene- 
ral conception. Yet by confining ourselves 
to the three points I have indicated, faith, 
discipline, and liberty, and holding to the 
threads that lead from them, it is possible to 
pass through the maze and to gain some idea 
of its strange bewildering fulness of life and 
thought- 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 61 



THE FAITH. 

The Church had hardly recovered from 
the blows of persecution, the wounds of the 
confessors had barely healed, when it was 
convulsed by theological controversy upon 
a fundamental doctrine of the faith, the 
nature of the Founder of Christianity. 

The controversy broke out in Alexandria, 
which had been for many years the home of 
Christian theological thought. In revulsion 
from opinions that seemed to deny any 
real distinction between the Persons of the 
Trinity, a presbyter named Arius had 
preached and written most vehemently, 
using language which implied, if it did not 
actually express the thought, that the Son 
of God was a creature and inferior in nature 
to the Father of all. At first popular sym- 
pathy seems to have been upon his side. 
Converts from heathenism were more ready 



62 THE CHURCH OF THE 

to accept this doctrine than the more myste- 
rious faith of the Catholics, especially as it 
was urged by Arius as necessary to a belief 
in the unity of God, the primary article of 
the faith which they had accepted at their 
conversion. When however it was demon- 
strated by the keen logic of Athanasius that 
the doctrine of Arius was necessarily dithe- 
istic, making two Gods of different natures 
from one another, this sympathy began to 
disappear. 

The victorious Constantine, when he had 
quieted civil dissensions and had made him- 
self sole master of the world, found to his 
surprise that the Christianity whose unity 
had overcome the divisions of paganism was 
divided into hostile parties. At first, he 
seems to have thought that the discord could 
be quieted by exhortation ; but when he found 
that this method of treatment only made 

A. d. the matter worse, he summoned a 

325 ' council of Christian bishops to meet 
at Nicsea in Bithynia to consider the matter. 

The method of settling theological disputes 
by a council of bishops was not unusual in 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 63 

the Church. The bishop had grown to be 
considered as the representative of the church 
over which he ruled, and assemblies of 
bishops meeting for purposes of common 
conference were believed to be specially gov- 
erned and guided by the Holy Spirit whom 
Christ had promised to his Church as a 
whole. Once before had Constantine sum- 
moned a council of bishops to meet, at that 
time in the West, to consider questions which 
distracted the Church in Africa. ^rles, 
The peculiarity of the meeting of A * D * 314t 
Nicaea was that it was the first which was 
distinctly general in its character. Bishops 
were summoned from West and East alike ; 
and though nearly all the three hundred and 
eighteen who attended were from the East, 
yet all felt that it was a gathering more 
solemn in its character than any which had 
been held before it. Everything was done by 
the imperial officials and by the bishops who 
were at the court of the emperor, to make 
this first formal assembly of the spiritual 
rulers of the Christian empire as impressive 
as possible. The proceedings were opened 



64 THE CHURCH OF THE 

by Constantine in person, in all the majesty 
of his imperial state, and he exhorted the 
bishops to unity and harmony. It must 
have been a most impressive gathering, for 
there were assembled there the men who 
held the highest station in the churches of 
the East. The bishop of Alexandria was 
there, with his quick-witted and brilliant 
young archdeacon, the celebrated Athana- 
sius ; there was Arius himself, the madman, 
the Libyan serpent, as his enemies nick- 
named him, tall, ascetic, severe, and with a 
peculiar nervous habit of twisting his body 
and thrusting forward his head suddenly 
when he was excited, that perhaps had 
gained for him the uncomplimentary title. 
There was the learned and courtly Eusebius 
of Nicomedia, the friend of Constantine and 
the great supporter of Arius, and there also 
was the dignified Hosius from Cordova in 
far-off Spain, who also possessed the confi- 
dence of the emperor, and used his influence 
to oppose the designs of Eusebius. Others 
were there who were famed, not so much for 
their learning or position as for their sane- 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 65 

tity — confessors, whose halting steps and 
mutilated faces bore witness to the constancy 
with which they had kept the faith in the 
days of terror, under Diocletian and Galerius. 
These, though simple-hearted men of little 
theological attainment, were able to exercise 
great influence by the reverence their char- 
acters inspired. 

The council, far from resenting the promi- 
nent part taken by the emperor in the pro- 
ceedings, welcomed thankfully his mingling 
in the affairs of the Church, as giving the 
august sanction of the civil authority to their 
conclusions and resolves. Theoretically, they 
conceived the decision of such a council of 
bishops to be the voice of the Holy Spirit ; 
but with a natural inconsistency pardonable 
in them, though of very evil import to the 
Church, they were glad to supplement the 
heavenly authority by earthly force. It was 
an amazing change, that might well have 
turned the heads of any men, for the Chris- 
tian prelates to find themselves honored, 
respected, and even treated with deference, 
by the master of the world and by his serv 



66 THE CHURCH OF THE 

ants, who were quick to follow the impe- 
rial example. 

The emperor, after formally opening the 
council, withdrew and left the discussion in 
the hands of the bishops. There was a gen- 
eral agreement that the negations of Arius 
were wrong and dangerous, but much diffi- 
culty was found in agreeing upon any form 
of belief that would exclude his error. A 
strong attempt was made by the friends of 
Arius to bring about the adoption of a creed 
which, though perfectly orthodox as far as 
it went, would have been broad enough to in- 
clude both Arians and Catholics. This was 
vigorously resisted by the party of the bishop 
of Alexandria and at last a clause was 
added which asserted that the Son was 
hornoousios, consubstantial with the Father, 
thus definitely pronouncing against the error 
which they condemned. Great difficulty was 
experienced in carrying this phrase, which 
was denounced as novel and unscriptural ; 
but the urgency of the emperor, who seized 
on it as the solution of the difficulty, pre- 
vailed upon the unwilling; and it was ae- 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 67 

cepted by all except Arms and two bishops 
who had been from the first his strongest 
supporters. They were condemned and dis- 
graced, and the amended creed was promul- 
gated with both conciliar and imperial au- 
thority, as the authorized belief of the Holy 
Catholic Church, the Church of the Christian 
empire. 

In this way the attempt of speculative 
philosophy, with a rabbinical use of the 
words of the Scriptures, to impose its novel- 
ties upon the Church, was met and defeated ; 
and the old traditional faith, with its new 
guarantee which the denials and negations 
of Arius had made necessary, was established 
with every sanction that Church and State 
could give it. Severe penalties were de- 
nounced against the upholders of the heresy, 
and the secular authority, which so recently 
had been engaged in attempting to uproot 
and suppress dissent from the established 
paganism, was now exercised in suppressing 
those, who though Christians differed from 
the form of Christianity that the empire 
acknowledged. This was an unfortunate re- 



158 THE CHURCH OF THE 

suit of the conversion of the empire, though 
one that was to have been expected ; and soon 
Catholics in their turn learned by experi- 
ence that the supremacy of the State in 
causes ecclesiastical was as dangerous under 
Christian emperors as under pagan. For 
with a surprising rapidity, in spite of the 
decrees of the council/ and the sacrosanct 
edicts of the emperor, the opinions of Arius 
seemed to spread and gain mastery in the 
East. The emperor himself was persuaded 
that the council had gone too far ; Arius was 
recalled ; the edicts were revoked ; and when 
Constantine died and was succeeded in the 
East by his son Constantius, all the imperial 
power was used to disseminate Arianism and 
to crush its opponents. "The world won- 
dered," to use St. Jerome's words, "to find 
itself Arian." In the East, the heroic 
Athanasius battled almost alone for the faith, 
but he was driven from his see and compelled 
to live in exile in the West. Such was the 
first object-lesson the Church received of 
the results of the union of Church and 
State. 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 69 

Yet, in spite of the apparent triumph of 
Arianism, its reign was only temporary. 
The struggle was a sharp one, but in less than 
fifty years from the death of Constantine 
Arianism was almost everywhere suppressed. 
Even at the time of its greatest success, the 
apostasy was not as general as it seemed. 
The Arian leaders could "maintain themselves 
only by the use of ambiguous and misleading 
formularies, cunningly contrived to have an 
orthodox sound and yet be susceptible of a 
heterodox construction. " The ears of the 
people were more loyal than the lips of their 
teachers." Again, Arianism soon split up 
into two sections, one of which was offen- 
sively negative in its teaching, denying en- 
tirely the divinity of the Son of God ; the 
other was much more moderate, composed 
of men who had either been misled by the 
metaphysical subtleties of Arius, or who, 
without agreeing with him in doctrine, ob- 
jected to the narrowing of the faith by new 
and unscriptural terms of communion. These 
latter were shocked at the blasphemy of 
the extreme men, and tended naturally to 



70 THE CHURCH OF THE 

approach closer and closer to the Nicene 
formula. 

In the less philosophic but more practical 
West, the heresy never flourished, in spite of 
the desperate attempts of the few bishops 
who espoused it, and the efforts of the im- 
perial power to bring about a forced unity of 
confession. During the lifetime of Constan- 
tine II. , and of Constans, when the West was 
politically separated from the East, the 
Catholics were supported by the imperial au- 
thority ; and though, in the short period that 
Constantius held the sole power, prelates of 
prominence, such as Liberius of Rome and 
Hosius of Cordova, were forced into submis- 
sion, their action was at once repudiated by 
the churches of Italy and Spain. Thus the 
Nicene formula, with its clear and definite 
statement of the historic faith, had always 
those who maintained and defended it, and 
constantly received accessions from the moder- 
ate party in the East, who were driven to it 
by the bald negations of those disciples of 
Arius who were more Arian than the here- 
siarch himself. The division of the empire 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 71 

between Valentinian and Valens emphasized 
the distinction between the parties, and the 
harsh measures of the Arian Valens drove 
many back to the faith which he persecuted. 
When at last he fell before the Goths A.D. 
at Hadrianople, the brave Spanish 378. 
general Theodosius became emperor in the 
East, and he threw his influence upon the 
side of the theology in which he had 
been reared. This brought the controversy 
to an end. A council was held at Con- 
stantinople in 381, and with hardly a 
dissenting voice the creed of Nicaea was 
ratified and promulgated once more as 
the authorized belief of Christendom. De- 
prived of secular support, Arianism passed 
away like a cloud, leaving however a bitter 
memory and an evil legacy of disputes and 
quarrels and of precedents for state interfer- 
ence. It survived only among the Germanic 
tribes, now pressing upon the boundaries of 
the empire, who clung to it with a national 
pride, as distinguishing them from the Eo- 
mans whom they hated and despised. 

Thus was ended the most serious struggle 



72 THE CHURCH OF THE 

for the faith that the Church had ever known, 
and it was ended with victory. Revelation, 
right reason, and tradition had met and van- 
quished a most dangerous assault from a 
half-converted philosophy and a wholly 
pagan scepticism. Yet, to win its victory, 
the Church had been obliged to define its 
faith more strictly and to trust to human 
phrases to defend its orthodoxy ; and it was 
not long before there were fresh battles 
to fight, and new definitions to make, to pre- 
vent misinterpretation of the form of words 
which now was accepted as the outward shrine 
of the faith. Philosophy did not give up 
its attempt to rationalize the Christian mys- 
teries. For another century or more, new 
heresies kept continually arising in regard to 
the Person of Jesus Christ, and the Church 
was distracted with the struggles between 
the rival parties. Each victory of orthodoxy 
seemed to pave the way for an exaggeration 
of the doctrine vindicated, until it became 
itself a heresy. Thus Nicsea had con- 
demned Arius for denying the perfect divi- 
nity of Christ ; Constantinople condemned 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 73 

Apollinarius for the contrary doctrine of 
denying the perfection of his humanity. At 
Ephesus, Nestorius, the great patri- a. D. 
arch of Constantinople, was held 431. 
to have gone so far in maintaining the per- 
fection of the humanity, as to throw doubt 
upon the completeness of the union of the 
divine and the human natures in the one 
person of the Saviour. They who condemned 
him were in their turn condemned at Chalce- 
don, for exaggerating their proper a. D. 
objection to the errors of Nesto- 451, 
rius into a denial of the distinctness and 
perfection of the two natures thus joined. 
Nestorianism can be seen to have been in its 
logical results a modified Arianism, while 
Eutychianism, as the heresy condemned at 
Chalcedon is called, was an error of the same 
nature as Apollinarianism. As these heresies 
arose they were met and condemned by 
general councils, and it is well for every 
modern Catholic to bear them and their 
results well in mind, for, though continually 
exposed, confuted, and condemned, the same 
errors continue to be re-invented from age to 



74 THE CHURCH OF THE 

age. One cannot do better than state the 
summary of these events in the words of 
Eichard Hooker, the greatest theologian the 
English race has ever produced ; words that 
though familiar to all students of theology, 
are not as generally known as they should 
be: 

" To gather therefore into one sum all that 
hath been hitherto spoken concerning this 
point, there are but four things which con- 
cur to make complete the whole state of our 
Lord Jesus Christ : His Deity, His Manhood, 
the conjunction of both, and the distinction 
of the one from the other being joined in one. 
Four principal heresies there are, which 
have in those things withstood the truth : 
Arians, by bending themselves against the 
Deity of Christ ; Apollinarians, by maiming 
and misinterpreting that which belongeth to 
His human nature ; Nestorians, by rending 
Christ asunder and dividing Him into two 
persons ; the followers of Eutyches, by con- 
founding in His person those natures which 
they should distinguish. Against these there 
have been four most famous councils : the 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 75 

council of Nice, to define against Arians ; 
against Apollinarians, the council of Con- 
stantinople ; the council of Ephesus against 
Nestorians ; against Eutychians, the Chalce- 
don council. In four tvords dx^ws, rex«?ws, 
dfocu/xfrws, d<n/7xi5rws, truly, perfectly, indivisibly, 
distinctly (the first applied to His being God, 
and the second to His being man, the third 
to His being of both One, and the fourth to 
His still continuing in that one Both), we 
may fully, by way of abridgment, comprise 
whatsoever antiquity hath at large handled, 
either in declaration of Christian belief, 
or in refutation of the aforesaid heresies. " 

The controversies of the sixth century were 
only modifications of these four great ques- 
tions. Human ingenuity speculating upon 
transcendent mysteries would venture some 
rash inference as an article of faith, and 
would for a time bring confusion into the 
Church, but after the council of Chalcedon, 
in 451, there was little if any development of 
Christian doctrine, even in the way of ex- 
planation, and the most enlightened portions 
of the empire adhered with tolerable stead- 



76 THE CHURCH OF THE 

fastness to the formula then set forth. The 
outlying churches in Syria and Egypt seem 
always to have had a tendency to exaggerate 
their favorite tenets into heresy. It may 
have been from some peculiarity of race, or 
perhaps from simple ignorance, or again it 
may have been from a jealousy of the power 
and influence of the great churches of the 
two imperial cities ; but the fact remains, 
that, from the fifth century onward, Jerusa- 
lem, where Christianity came into being, An- 
tioch, where it first received its name, and 
Alexandria, for so long the home of Christian 
theology, came to be centres of error and 
division. The Catholic faith was the faith 
of the empire, and especially of the Latin 
and Greek speaking countries. The weaken- 
ing of the bonds that held together politically 
the Empire and its outlying provinces was 
manifested also in the Church. 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 77 



II 

THE MORALS OF THE CHURCH. 

Heresy was not the only evidence of the 
attempt of the world to destroy the Church. 
There was another and more insidious danger 
to be resisted, for heathen influence tended 
also to corrupt Christian practice and Chris- 
tian morality. Superstitious practices which 
the early apologists had derided when used 
by the heathen, crept into the usages of the 
Church and were accepted as part of its 
system. It would have been impossible for 
the pagan world to conform itself to the 
austere Christianity of the second century ; 
there were many more points of contact 
between the world and the Church in the 
fourth century. Multitudes now poured 
into the Church, following the example of 
their imperial master, and brought with 
them many of their old customs and old 



78 THE CHURCH OF THE 

ideas. It cannot be denied that in this 
period Christian practice lost much of its 
old simplicity and conformed itself to the 
lower standard of the world it had conquered. 
Bishops, who became imperial functionaries, 
were apt to pattern their manners after those 
of their secular contemporaries ; and those 
who rose to the charge of great patriarchates, 
' ' wielded a power, " as Newman says, c ' which 
in times of external prosperity and in ordi- 
nary hands was too great for human nature. " 
The secular duties of the episcopate became so 
numerous that it took the magnanimity and 
the sanctity of great men like Athanasius, 
Ambrose, and Chrysostom to overcome their 
temptations ; and when they fell into the 
hands of men "of coarser grain," it is not 
wonderful that they produced a degenera- 
tion in the conception of the spiritual duties 
of the office. 

The ceremonies of worship grew more and 
more elaborate as the Church increased in 
the wealth of this world ; the incense which 
had been ridiculed by the apologists and con- 
sidered to be the very symbol of pagan wor- 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 79 

ship, now rose in clouds before the Christian 
altars. The use of pictures and images to 
aid devotion grew rapidly, and it was not 
long before practices essentially idolatrous 
crept into Christianity, and were excused or 
defended by the same arguments which had 
served the philosophic pagans in former days. 
The local shrines of nymph and demi-god, 
instead of disappearing utterly, were con- 
secrated to saints and martyrs, whose in- 
tercession was considered as efficacious as 
had been the powers of the former posses- 
sors. The Virgin Mary, whose memory 
from the first had been held in profound 
respect, became the object of a reverence 
which recalls at least, if it is not actually 
derived from, the honors which had been 
paid to the goddesses of the old religions. 
In short, the pressure of the world upon the 
Church did much to destroy the high stand- 
ard of simplicity and spirituality which had 
been the general characteristic of the Chris- 
tianity of the first three centuries. 

As heathen influence attacked the Chris- 
tian faith in the form of heresy and Chris- 



80 THE CHURCH OF THE 

tian practice in the forms of superstition, so 
also did it assail Christian morality by at- 
tempting to reduce it to the old standards of 
the pagan world. The rush of half-converted 
heathen into the Church tended naturally to 
introduce into it many of the pagan ideas in 
regard to the conduct of life. Former periods 
of peace had always been accompanied by an 
increasing laxity of discipline and a lower- 
ing of the tone of the community ; and now 
it was almost impossible for the Church to 
assimilate its hosts of new adherents with- 
out being in some degree at least assimilated 
to them. Various sects split off from the 
Church, from a desire to maintain by puni- 
tive measures the ancient sternness of dis- 
cipline which the more practical minds of 
the great majority of the bishops saw was 
an impossibility. The Donatists in Africa 
and the Novatians all over the empire, much 
as they differed, were alike in condemning 
the laxity of the Catholics ; but the uncom- 
promising puritanism of the latter destroyed 
the influence that they might have had if 
they had been more moderate, and the zeal 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 81 

of the former soon degenerated into ignorant 
fanaticism. But though, from a wise leni- 
ency, the Church refused to go to the same 
degree of stern regulation of manners which 
had been possible in an earlier and simpler 
age, none the less did it protest most earn- 
estly against the growing secularization and 
carelessness among its members. If it did 
not compel the ancient simplicity, it invited 
to it and held up before the eyes of the 
world an ideal of the religious life. The 
protest of the Church may be found in the 
rapid growth of monasticism and in the adop- 
tion of ascetic principles by all the great 
saints and leaders. 

The origin of monasticism is obscure. It is 
probably an oriental practice which was bor- 
rowed or imitated by the Christians of the 
fourth century. The first Christian monks of 
whom we have any clear account were in 
Arabia and Egypt in the time of the last strug- 
gle between heathenism and Christianity, and 
the sanctity of their lives led to their example 
being followed in the next generation by many 

others. The fundamental idea of monasticism 
6 



82 THE CHURCH OF THE 

was that of retirement from the world for the 
salvation of the soul ; nothing whatever — no 
natural ties, no circumstances of life, fortune, 
or position — being allowed to interfere with 
this one all-absorbing object. "It was not 
a question of this or that vocation, of the 
better deed, of the higher state, but of life 
and death. In later times a variety of holy 
objects might present themselves for devotion 
to choose from, such as the care of the poor, 
or of the sick, or of the young, the redemp- 
tion of captives, or the conversion of the 
barbarians ; but early monachism was flight 
from the world, and nothing else. The 
troubled, jaded, weary heart, the stricken, 
laden conscience, sought a life free from cor- 
ruption in its daily work, free from distrac- 
tion in its daily worship, and it sought em- 
ployments as contrary as possible to the 
world's employments, employments the end 
of which would be in themselves, in which 
each day, each hour, would have its own com- 
pleteness ; no elaborate undertakings, no 
difficult aims, no anxious ventures, no un- 
certainties to make the heart beat, or the tern- 



CHB1STIAN EMPIRE. 83 

pies throb, no painful combination of efforts, 
no extended plan of operations, no multipli- 
city of details, no deep calculations, no sus- 
tained machinations, no suspense, no vicissi- 
tudes, no moments of crisis or catastrophe ; 
nor again any subtle investigations, nor 
perplexities of proof, nor conflicts of rival in- 
tellects, to agitate, harass, depress, stimulate, 
weary, or intoxicate the soul. " * 

It was this that gave the monastic life 
from the first its great attractiveness to men 
who were wearied with struggle. There 
they might die to the world, and obtain rest 
for their souls, in the calm simplicity of a 
life with but one object, one aim, one interest. 
There were also secondary objects of the sol- 
itary state : that the mind thus freed from 
worldly distractions might devote itself to 
prayer and praise ; that by self-denial, fast- 
ing, thirst, discomfort of every kind, they 
might mortify their earthly and corrupt 
affections, and thus fit themselves for the 
presence of God. Yet these, important as 
they were, were still subordinate to the pri- 
* Newman, Historical Sketches, III. 375. 



84 THE CHUBCH OF THE 

mary object — to escape from the world, in 
order to flee from the wrath to come. Soon 
the Nubian valleys, the Nitrian desert, the 
defiles of Arabia, the barren uplands of Syria, 
were covered with cells of hermits and com- 
munities of monks and nuns, who had thus 
renounced the world, and had given them- 
selves to what soon came to be called, by a 
daring usurpation, the religious life. They 
spread everywhere, and soon the black robe 
of the monk was familiar in the crowded 
cities as well as in the lonely wastes. All 
the greatest men of the fourth century were 
either monks themselves or patrons of con- 
vents and monasteries. Basil, Gregory of 
Nazianzum, Chrysostom, Nestorius, Epi- 
phanius, Theodore, Theodoret, and perhaps 
Athanasius, had all experience of the monas- 
tic life ; while in the West, Jerome, Cassian, 
Martin, Pelagius, were monks, and Augus- 
tine and Ambrose, though not professed 
themselves, were strong in their support and 
encouragement of the system. 

Monasticism uttered a protest, all the 
louder because it was by deeds not words, 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 85 

against the corruption of the age ; and 
though it was abused by the idle and the 
ignorant and lost its original singleness of 
heart and aim, we should never forget what 
were the services it rendered by protesting, 
as it did, that the life was more than meat 
and the body more than raiment, and that 
there was nothing in all the world that a 
man could give in exchange for his soul. 

The monastic movement exercised a deep 
influence over many who did not actually 
become monks or nuns. Its practices became 
the standards and ideals of the spiritual life, 
and were the desire and aspiration of many 
devout and humble souls, who were not able 
to profess the full monastic vows. Asceti- 
cism was indeed nothing new in the Church ; 
the most earnest of the Christian teachers 
in the second and third century had urged 
its helpfulness and its beauty upon their dis- 
ciples ; and now the influx of worldliness was 
met by a great increase of ascetic practices 
and by a higher estimation of their value as 
an offering to God ; and bishops and clergy 
whose duties kept them in the world, mothers 



86 THE CHURCH OF THE 

and wives, parents and children, who were 
not able to obey the call of the votaries of 
monasticism and cast aside the impulses and 
affections God had given them, yet felt that 
they should compensate for their worldly 
position, or for their domestic happiness, by 
chastening their bodies and mortifying in 
some way their natural desires. Beautiful 
as the idea was, it was liable to pass into 
the grievous error that their bodies and their 
affections were in themselves evil, and into 
the still more erroneous belief that self-tor- 
ture was in itself pleasing to the Almighty. 
The idea of the superior holiness of the un- 
married life had been growing in strength. 
It was probably of heretical origin, but fell 
in so thoroughly with the ascetic system that 
it came to be very generally accepted ; and 
Christians who married felt that their posi- 
tion was very inferior, to that of those who 
had preserved their single condition. A 
most exaggerated estimate was placed upon 
virginity, and a prurient sentimentality took 
the place of the simple-minded and uncon- 
scious purity of the earlier days of Chris- 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 87 

tianity. The opinion spread rapidly through 
the Church that the clergy should live single 
lives ; and though, by the canons of Nicsea, 
those who were married before they were 
ordained were allowed to keep their wives, 
the tendency, especially in the sterner West, 
was towards celibacy. Fasts were frequent, 
and, with an idea that bodily discomfort was 
an offering to God, were multiplied by many 
of the most devout until they injured their 
health and wrecked their usefulness. 

But with all its mistake and vagaries, 
asceticism was a useful and even a neces- 
sary protest against the profuse and shame- 
less luxury of the age, which was the mock 
of moralists of every school, Christian and 
pagan as well. It was better for a man to 
starve himself, even to the point of injury, 
than for him to over-eat himself ; better to 
wear sackcloth and coarse garments than to 
lavish estates on his back, like the Eoman 
nobles and ladies of whom both Ammianus 
and Jerome tell us, or the ladies in Con- 
stantinople who roused the indignant scorn of 
Chrysostom. It was better to live single, 



88 THE CHURCH OF THE 

better even to have absurd ideas about the 
merits of celibacy, than to riot and revel in 
the foul impurities which disgraced the daily 
life of even Christian communities. When 
we read the denunciations of the world by 
some of the Fathers of this period, we are at 
first shocked and scandalized at what seems 
to be most exaggerated pessimism, because 
we unconsciously apply the words to the 
world as we know it to-day, which, though 
it has much evil, is yet the better for fifteen 
centuries of Christian training. When, on 
the other hand, we realize how unspeakably 
corrupt and evil was the world to which they 
did refer, and which they knew far more 
thoroughly than we can know it, we shall 
have more patience with their seeming 
extravagance. If we smile at the exaggera- 
tions of ascetics, and deplore the false esti- 
mate of relative duties that they inculcated ; 
if we condemn the sublime selfishness of 
those who deserted friends, family, and posi- 
tion, for the sake of saving their own souls ; 
we must still remember that it was asceti- 
cism and monasticism that bore witness, in 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. g$ 

a way that even the blindest could see and 
appreciate, to the necessary union of right- 
eousness and belief and to the supreme ex- 
cellence and necessity of decency and purity 
of life. 



90 THE CHURCH OF THE 



III. 

ECCLESIASTICAL INDEPENDENCE. 

Once more, the world attacked the Church 
by the union of Church and State, and by 
the growing tendency in emperors and their 
officials to interfere in the purely religious 
province of the Church. By the conversion 
of the empire a close connection was natu- 
rally and inevitably formed between the secu- 
lar power and the Christian organization. 
In fact, it was this compact organization, so 
simple yet so effective, that had secured its 
triumph. The bishops of the Church formed 
a body with which the emperors could treat, 
and the system possessed a unity that cor- 
responded peculiarly with the well-subordi- 
nated political unity which was the ideal of 
Constantine and his successors. Little by 
little the bishops became men of affairs, 
almost imperial officials, until in the great 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE, 91 

patriarchal sees they rivalled in importance 
the prefects themselves, the immediate rep- 
resentatives of the emperor. The desire of 
having the support of the State in the con- 
tests with paganism and heresy led to a sub- 
servience on the part of prelates that was 
doomed to bear a bitter fruit ; and emperors, 
from enforcing decrees of faith, passed readily 
into imposing them of their own will. That 
this was a pressing danger should be realized, 
for of all the evil legacies of heathenism, it 
has been most persistent and most apologized 
for ; yet it would be a most grievous mistake 
to imagine that the Church as a whole sub- 
mitted willingly or generally to State inter- 
ference. In the East, after controversy and 
heresy had exhausted the Church, the bishops 
sank indeed into little more than State 
officials ; but in the West, and also in the 
East during the period to which this lecture 
especially refers, the invasion by the State of 
ecclesiastical privileges was again and again 
resisted, with a boldness and a fidelity that re- 
call the early days of persecution at the hands 
of the heathen. This age has its saints and 



92 THE CHURCH OF THE 

confessors, as well as the former age of 
struggle ; and the spiritual leaders of the 
Church were always contending against the 
claim of the imperial power to dictate to 
bishops what they should believe and teach 
or whom they should admit to their com- 
munion. Neither exile nor persecution nor 
A. d. threats nor violence could daunt 
296-373. ^.] ie h ero i c spirit of Athanasius, as 

he fought almost alone against the ruler of 
the world in defence of the faith of Christian- 
ity. Neither threats nor blows nor exile 
nor lingering death could bend the resolution 
A. D. of the brilliant and holy Chrysos- 

397-407. j. om ^ w h 0? like his namesake the 

Baptist, did " constantly speak the truth, 

boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for 

A. d. the truth's sake." Ambrose of 

374-397. ]y[ii an b a de a stern defiance to the 
commands of an Arian empress to surrender 
one of his churches to the heretics, and boldly 
rebuked the great Theodosius when, red with 
the blood of the innocent, he attempted to 
A. D. present himself at the altar. Cyril 

412-444, £ Alexandria, little as are his 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 93 

claims to sanctity, was a determined opposer 
of the usurping authority of the emperor's 
agents, and won a battle for the Church, 
though with weapons that were unsuited to 
his holy office. Nor need more be named ; one 
can hardly read a page of the historians of the 
period without finding some instance of the 
resistance of the Church to the domination of 
the secular power. But the conflict was in it- 
self a misfortune, for even where most right- 
eous and necessary, contention and strife bear 
evil passions in their train ; the effect upon 
the character which came from contending for 
privilege or even for a proper independence 
of state control, was very different from that 
which had been produced in the previous cen- 
tury by the contest for the faith. Out of these 
contests arose the claims of spiritual prero- 
gative, that made each see jealous of its neigh- 
bors and rivals, and finally led to the claims 
of spiritual supremacy which were raised 
by the bishops of the old imperial Rome. 

Thus, though the world assailed the 
Church with threefold vehemence at the 
moment of seeming triumph, its assaults 



94 THE CHUBCH OF THE 

were met and resisted, and Christianity arose, 
bleeding and disfigured perhaps, but victori- 
ous, from the struggle. The attack upon the 
Christian belief was repelled by the heroic 
resistance of a few and by the quiet con- 
stancy of the many, and the faith was clearly 
and explicitly defined in the creeds of the 
four great General Councils of Nicaea, Con- 
stantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. The 
attack upon the morality and spirituality 
of Christian worship and Christian life was 
opposed by the stern self-denial of asceticism 
and by the severe simplicity of monastic life 
and worship. The attack upon the Church's 
independence was fought out by a spirited 
resistance on the part of the leaders ; who, 
while honoring the Emperor as God's repre- 
sentative on earth in temporal affairs, re- 
fused to surrender the precious liberty of 
thought and action which was their Chris- 
tian heritage. 

No period in the history of Christianity is 
as rich as this in great men, whose lives and 
words have shaped the course of human 
affairs — great saints, great scholars, great 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 95 

preachers, great theologians. The stir of the 
times, its manifold and complex life, the 
greatness of its events, is reflected in the 
majestic figures of the Christian leaders. 
Ecclesiastical biography becomes a study of 
the profoundest interest, and we are most 
fortunate in possessing contemporary records 
of great value which, together with the volu- 
minous writings of many of the great actors 
themselves, enable us to gain a vivid concep- 
tion of their lives and characters. A period 
which comprises such men as Athanasius, 
Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, 
Ambrose, Martin, Jerome, Augustine, to 
mention only a few of the most prominent, 
can hardly fail to be brilliant and full of 
interest. The individuality of the Fathers 
of the period is as striking as the strength of 
their characters and their sanctity. No two 
of them are alike ; each great soul had, as it 
were, its own special angle of polarization, 
for the transmission of the divine light which 
was the life of them all. In Athanasius 
we have the stern theologian, the gallant 
warrior, faithful among the faithless ; in 



96 THE CHURCH OF THE 

Basil, the sweet-tempered mystic, loyal and 
true to his appointed service, in spite of 
depressing illness, misrepresentation, and 
suspicion ; in Chrysostom, the brilliant or- 
ator, the keen and sensitive spirit, which 
could spend and be spent for those he loved, 
but which was as resolute as that of Atha- 
nasius, when resistance was a duty. In 
Ambrose we have the majestic prelate, yet 
the simple-hearted servant of Christ, who 
took up the heavy burden of the episcopate, 
which had come to him against his will, and 
made it redound to the praise and glory of 
God. In Martin we see the devout soldier, 
the earnest missionary, carried out of him- 
self by the love of the souls of sinning and 
suffering men ; one of the most apostolic 
figures of the period, warm-hearted, enthusi- 
astic, and spiritually-minded. There can be 
no greater contrast than between him and 
his contemporary Jerome, whom also the 
Church reveres as a saint ; the brilliant, 
erratic, dogmatic scholar, the great expo- 
nent of monasticism by his pen, as Martin 
was by his example ; the translator and com- 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 97 

mentator of the Scriptures, constantly in- 
volved in controversy, never at peace or 
quiet, a stormy character, as boisterous yet as 
invigorating as the winds of March. One 
worked in quiet, the other in the uproar of 
the tempest, yet each did his work thoroughly 
and well, and for the sake of the one Master. 
And of them all there is none that we know 
so well, or feel so near to us, as the great 
Augustine, partly because his acute thought 
has shaped the theology of western Christen- 
dom, more however because he has laid 
bare before us his very soul, in that most 
inimitable of all books, the " Confessions." 
Brought into the Church in his mature man- 
hood, after a youth misspent in heresy and 
in sin, he was able to exercise an influence 
in the Church, which was the more profound 
because his convictions were the result of a 
bitter experience of the emptiness and bar- 
renness of a life without religion. His con- 
version deepened in him the sense of the 
awfulness of sin as estranging man from 
God, and of the helplessness of man without 
the aid of the divine grace. So Augustine 



98 THE CHURCH OF THE 

became the great theologian and doctor of 
the West, and his theology was built upon 
the evangelical doctrine of man's need of a 
Saviour. With an earnestness which is un- 
equalled, with a learning rarely surpassed, 
with a rhetorical skill that few have ever 
possessed in like degree, he devoted all the 
powers of his soul, all the rich gifts of his 
mind, all the strength of his body, to urging 
the claims of Christ as the Saviour of man- 
kind. His system was one-sided, it is true, 
but the value of the truth that he presented 
so unceasingly is so inestimable that we 
cannot wonder that it controlled his thought 
and shaped his system of theology. Like 
his master Ambrose, he was an ascetic, 
but his robust common sense and his very 
theology, by the intensity with which it 
gazed upon the redemptive work of Christ, 
saved him from the error of attributing any 
inherent merit to the mortification of the 
flesh. Asceticism to him was the natural 
mode of life for a penitent sinner, not the 
perfection of a saint. 
There is a striking contrast between the 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 99 

theology of the eastern, and that of the west- 
ern or Latin Churches. The one was specula- 
tive and mystical, the other practical ; the 
controversies upon the mysteries of the 
Trinity and the Incarnation never took hold 
of the western mind. The straightforward 
Roman, strong in his sense of law, accepted 
the Nicene formula as final, and had little 
temptation to fall into error by over-refine- 
ment of thought. The " credo quia absur- 
dum " of Tertullian expresses in its strong 
paradox the leading characteristic of Latin 
religious thought. It was not without good 
cause that the Eoman Church was appealed 
to so often during the fourth and fifth cent- 
uries, by the contestants in the great theo- 
logical struggles ; for, far from the strife of 
tongues, the bishops of the apostolic see of 
the West were able to steer a straight course 
by keeping their eye fixed steadily on the 
truth they had received. The same boldness 
and clearness of vision that enabled Leo of 
Rome to protect his people from Attila and 
from Gaiseric, enabled him to declare the faith 
in his celebrated letter to the council of Chal- 



100 THE CHURCH OF THE 

cedon, in which, with rare tact and logic, he 
picked his way between the rival heresies of 
Nestorius and Eutyches, by holding fast to 
the one great conception which formed part 
of the life of the Church then, as it had done 
for ages, that Jesus Christ was very God and 
very Man. 

The western mind, when it speculated, 
preferred to dwell upon the relations of man 
to God ; so that the one great western heresy 
which both Leo and Augustine opposed was 
that of Pelagius, who exalted the free will 
of man to such a height that he seemed to 
deny the necessity of the grace of God. The 
Roman devotion to order and law colored 
the theology of the West, and men's concep- 
tions of the divine rule were shaped after 
the pattern of the imperial rule on earth 
with which they were familiar. The West 
had no genius for transcendental thought. 
Its mind required definiteness and clearness, 
and hence in the western theologians we 
miss the exalted thought and high-soaring 
reasoning of the speculative Greeks and Orien- 
tals. Its weakness was in a tendency to 



CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 101 

narrowness and to materialism ; but it maybe 
doubted whether any less definite faith than 
that of Leo and Augustine and their followers 
could have withstood the trials which the 
coming centuries were to bring upon them. 
At least we may see this, that while a great 
part of the intellectual East fell before the 
assaults of the simple and definite belief of 
Islam, the Churches of the West were able to 
convert their heathen and heretical invaders, 
and to set up a bulwark against which the 
Mohammedan victors dashed themselves in 
vain. 

The period ends in the midst of trouble, 
sorrow, and anxiety ; the barriers that had 
for so long held back the nations of the North 
were broken down, and the civilized world 
saw anarchy and chaos sweeping away those 
time-honored institutions which seemed to 
men's minds as parts of the very order of 
nature itself. The imperial government was 
destroyed in the western prefectures, and 
even in the East the circle was narrowing 
fast around the capital that Constantine had 
reared upon the Bosporus. But, unshaken 



102 THE CHURCH OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE. 

and unchanged in all its great realities, 
though setting itself with new forms to 
meet new needs as they came, the Church 
stood steadfast and fearless, amid the wreck 
of systems and the ruin of the world. ( ' The 
rivers of the flood thereof shall make glad 
the city of God," had been the prediction of 
the Hebrew psalmist, and, by its unchange- 
ableness and its stability, in the midst of the 
constant flow of change and decay of all tem- 
poral power and authority, the Christian 
organization proved its right to claim that 
honored name. 

It is a strange history, but one rises from 
its perusal with a stronger sense of the eter- 
nal truth and sureness of the promises of 
God ; and the words of David rise again to 
the lips : "The Lord sitteth above the water- 
flood, and the Lord remaineth a King for- 
ever. The Lord shall give strength unto His 
people, the Lord shall give His people the 
blessing of peace." 



LECTURE III. 

THE CHURCH OF WESTERN EUROPE. 




LECTURE m. 

THE CHURCH OF WESTERN EUROPE. 

We saw in the last lecture how hard it is 
for us to comprehend fully the history of 
the Church of the Early Empire ; it belongs 
to a civilization that is entirely foreign to us, 
and its point of view eludes us. Our methods 
of thought are different from those of the 
Christians of Greece and Syria and Egypt, 
and it is only with an effort that we can put 
ourselves into sympathy with them. It takes 
a very vigorous exercise of the best trained 
historic imagination to enter into anything 
like a clear conception of a life so foreign and 
a mode of thought so strange. In spite of 
the attempts of transcendental philosophers 
to revive it, the thought of Origen and Cle- 
ment, and even much of that of Chrysostom 

and Athanasius, can never be anything more 

105 



106 THE CHURCH OF 

than an exotic in western Christendom. 
Far different is the case when we come to the 
consideration of the history of that great 
Church of the West, which has shaped, col- 
ored, and inspired the whole of our modern 
European and American civilization. What 
we are to-day, our habits of mind, our mode 
of thought, the general character of our re- 
ligious ideas — all is mainly due to its influ- 
ence. In spite of the present unhappy divis- 
ions of Christendom, there still exists a 
western Christianity which is distinct from 
the eastern type ; and its characteristics are 
so persistent, that in all the sects and schisms 
into which it is divided there are more points of 
correspondence and union than of difference, 
and Eomanists and Protestants resemble 
one another more closely than either of them 
resemble their brethren in the East. Much 
as we differ from the Church of Eome and 
protest against its modern dogmas and its 
usurped authority, it is always a comforting 
thought that our differences are much less 
important than the truths we hold in com- 
mon. For the last four centuries the west- 



WESTERN EUROPE. 107 

ern Church has been divided, but these form 
but a small part of its history ; for a thou- 
sand years it was joined together in a close 
and vital unity, and accomplished a wonder- 
ful work in building up, out of the ruins of 
the past and the vigorous life of the Ger- 
manic peoples, a new and strong civilization, 
fuller and grander and with nobler aims 
than the old civilization which was swept 
away. While the Churches in the East either 
fell before the assaults of the Moslem, or 
grew decrepit like the decaying Empire with 
which they were too closely connected for 
their good, the Church in the West rose to 
its opportunities and, instinct with the crea- 
tive spirit, converted once again a chaos 
into a cosmos, and reared upon the ruins 
of the imperial power a vast spiritual em- 
pire. 

In considering so rapidly the leading events 
of a thousand years of endeavor, of work, of 
victory, and of failure, it is evidently neces- 
sary to fix our minds on some prominent 
points to guide us through the vast maze of 
attractive and fascinating detail ; and for 



108 THE CHURCH OF 

this purpose nothing can serve us better than 
to observe with care : 

1. The evangelization of the Teutonic 
tribes ; 

2. The growth, dominance, and decline of 
the power of the Papacy. 

These two subjects are closely connected 
and interwoven together, historically as well 
as logically ; they were mutually causes and 
effects, acting and reacting upon each other. 
The two great forces by whose joint work 
our modern society has been built up are the 
Germanic peoples with their strong race 
character, and Christianity with its vigorous 
organization as well as its inherent truth. 
When the convulsions of the fifth century 
seemed to have reduced the political condi- 
tion of the western world to utter ruin, the 
see of Rome succeeded in making its own all 
that was most vital in the old imperial sys- 
tem, all that was the strongest in the spirit 
of the Roman people. It reared itself upon 
the ruins of the ancient state ; it taught the 
new nations in the ways of civilization and 
religion, guiding and ruling them, as chil- 



WESTERN EUBOPE. 109 

dren are ruled and guided. At last, however, 
it came to consider that this guiding and 
ruling was the one essential thing, for which 
all else in the world existed ; it exercised the 
dominion which it had acquired, merely for 
the dominion's sake, and then the new na- 
tions, which it had taught and reared from 
childhood to adolescence, rebelled against 
being treated as children forever, and threw 
off its authority. 

All are familiar with the fact, that in the 
fifth and sixth centuries of our era the 
Germanic tribes, which for several hundred 
years had threatened the empire, burst over 
its borders, and before them the weakened 
imperial organization fell prostrate. It is 
true that the collapse of the empire was a 
gradual process, but it was none the less com- 
plete. The slow stream of lava, that creeps 
along inch by inch, engulfs vineyard and vil- 
lage on the slopes of .iEtna or Vesuvius, not 
less surely than do the showers of ashes and 
the fiery rain that bring destruction at once. 
Little by little the frightened world beheld 
over all the West the overthrow of the 



110 THE CHURCH OF 

old order, and the substitution, in the place 
of system and law, of the arbitrary will 
of the German war chiefs. Fierce Vandals 
made the rich and prosperous Africa their 
own, destroying and wasting its richness, 
blasting its prosperity ; Goths, a shade less 
barbarous, ruled at Toledo and Toulouse, 
Cordova and Bordeaux. Other and nobler 
Goths, at Eome and Ravenna, gave peace for 
a time to plundered Italy, but were over- 
thrown by the forces of the empire, only to 
make room for fiercer and more savage Lom- 
bards. Wild Franks held the Ehineland and 
the valley of the Scheldt, and soon overran 
and conquered the rest of the ancient Gaul, 
driving the Gothic chieftains from Aquitaine, 
and subduing and assimilating the Burgun- 
dians of Dijon and Besancon. In Britain, 
forsaken by the Roman legions, the blood- 
thirsty and piratical Angles and Saxons drove 
the christianized Britons from their populous 
cities and fertile fields in the east and south, 
and established, on the ruins of Roman and 
Celtic civilization, a purely Teutonic sav- 
agery, which yet contained within it many 



WESTERN EUROPE. HI 

germs of progress and advance. In the fron- 
tier lands, east of the Rhine and behind the 
Alps, conditions were even worse ; for there 
the tribes which had been hindmost in the 
race were fighting savagely with one another 
for the next chance at the spoils of the Em- 
pire. Everywhere was chaos. One conquer- 
ing tribe was now in the ascendant, and now 
another ; one would begin to establish some 
rudimentary order, and take some first halt- 
ing steps on the path of civilization, when 
forth from the forest would pour some fresh 
swarm of fur-clad warriors, hardier and 
hungrier than the last, who would swallow 
up their predecessors, and thus add one more 
change to the bewildering confusion of the 
times. One might well have asked, when 
empire disappeared, and the majesty of the 
Roman law was set at nought, whether there 
could be any power stable enough to resist 
the universal dissolution, living enough to 
bring order again to the distracted world. 

Though secular institutions were swept 
away, the Christian Church survived the 
storm. The waves of invasion swept power- 



112 THE CHUBCH OF 

less about it ; ill-treatment, brutality, bar- 
barous violence, only strengthened it in its 
domain over the souls of men. It was the 
Church, not simply Christianity, that met 
and conquered the victorious barbarians ; the 
Catholic Church, fully organized, a definite 
society, possessing an organic life, highly 
developed and specialized, with its clergy and 
its laity, with its traditional discipline, with 
its independent resources, its habits of gen- 
eral discussion and concerted action, its 
clergy already trained men of affairs, its 
monasteries as centres of religious life in the 
outposts, its wealth of traditions and of pre- 
cedents — it was this highly specialized body 
that met the rude masters of the new world 
and bade them pause in their career of self- 
seeking, self-willed destruction ; that taught 
them all they would learn of its high lessons ; 
that restrained their wildness, curbed their 
madness and self-will, and endeavored to 
conform them to its own likeness. An un- 
organized Christianity (if we can conceive of 
such a contradiction) would have perished in 
the confusion of the times. The Churches of 



WESTERN EUROPE. 113 

the East, highly organized as they were, 
failed to check the spread of Mohammedan- 
ism ; but in the West, fortunately for the 
faith, fortunately for human society, there 
was an organization of a stronger character, 
that was able to stand the strain and stress 
of the centuries of anarchy without yielding 
or breaking. 

This element of strength was supplied, 
partly at least, by the peculiar position of 
dignity and importance which was held in 
the West by the bishop of the apostolic and 
imperial see of Rome. I say partly, for we 
should also remember the sterner and sim- 
pler character of Latin Christianity which 
I have already mentioned ; it had not been 
exhausted by theological controversy like 
the East, and religion had taken there 
rather the shape of a rule of life than of a 
form of orthodox belief. Yet it was this very 
practical character that made the Papacy a 
possibility, and that gave it power ; so that 
it became an instrument in the hands of God 
for the conversion of heathen Europe, and 
for the preservation, and transmission to a 

O 



114 THE CHURCH OF 

new Teutonic civilization, of all that was 
most precious in the old order which was 
swept away. 

From an early period the bishops of Eome 
had claimed precedence and peculiar honor 
for their see. This claim, which undoubtedly 
was the result of the great importance of the 
capital and of its strange influence upon 
men's minds even in its decadence, was 
based by them, and is still based, upon three 
assumptions, none of which has ever been 
proved, nor ever can be. They are as 
follows : — 

1. That Christ gave St. Peter authority over 
the other apostles and the entire Church. 

2. That St. Peter was bishop of Eome. 

3. That the supposed supremacy of St. 
Peter was connected with the see of Rome, 
and descended to his successors in it. 

On this insecure foundation is built up the 
whole fabric of the papal claims — an immense 
pyramid, it is true, but balanced upon its 
apex. 

During the imperial age, these assump- 
tions had been disregarded by the rest of the 



WESTERN EUROPE. 115 

Church, except when some bishop in diffi- 
culty with his metropolitan, or patriarch in 
trouble with the Emperor, wished to enlist 
the bishop of Rome upon his side ; but the 
claims were reiterated with a steadiness, 
each precedent was utilized with an adroit- 
ness, which show that from a very early 
period the popes had formed the fixed pur- 
pose of pushing forward their demands at 
every available opportunity. In this course 
they have persisted with a wonderful stabil- 
ity ; no backward steps have ever been taken, 
no claims ever withdrawn, but every oppor- 
tunity of advancing them has been seized, 
with a tact that is amazing and with an 
ingenuity almost more than human. They 
would have us believe that they are as they 
have been from the beginning, that the 
Papacy dates from the apostolic age, if not 
from Christ himself. Yet we can count the 
steps in the growth of the amazing structure, 
from its small beginnings to its colossal 
majesty in the middle ages, as men count 
the rings of yearly growth in the trunk of 
some huge tree. 



116 THE CHURCH OF 

The claims were, as I have said, of an 
early date, and though unheeded were con- 
stantly reiterated, until men in an uncritical 
age began to believe that there must be 
some reality underlying the assumptions, 
and to pay special, though not exclusive, 
honor to the occupant of what came to be 
called the Apostolic See. When the political 
importance of the city of Rome declined, and 
Milan or Ravenna became the imperial resi- 
dence in the West, the bishop of Rome was 
left the most important personage in the 
deserted capital, and he began to take to 
himself and his office all the old historical 
prestige of the imperial city. His diocese, 
which at first had been simply the district of 
the urban prefect — the city and the suburbs 
about it — was extended to cover all the ter- 
ritory governed by the imperial vicars in 
Italy, which corresponded nearly with the 
peninsula proper. Then, little by little, the 
jurisdiction was extended : first, appellate 
jurisdiction only was claimed ; then this was 
construed to give immediate authority, till 
finally, in the last hours of imperial rule 



WESTERN EUROPE. 117 

in the West, Leo persuaded the miserable 
ValentinianllL, the last ignoble scion of the 
Theodosian house to extend by imperial 
edict the jurisdiction of the Roman bishop 
over the entire western empire. ^ d 
Thus, step by step, here a little and 428 - 
there a little, the papal claims had made good 
headway before the final catastrophe arrived, 
which, by destroying all general secular 
authority in the West, tended to advance 
the ecclesiastical authority that survived. 

Most of the Germanic war bands, which 
overran the provinces and swept away the 
old machinery of government, were nomi- 
nally Christians ; but their Christianity was 
of a very rudimentary character, and much 
colored by their old heathen beliefs. More- 
over, they had been converted during the 
period of the Arian ascendency, and they 
clung to their heretical belief with great 
tenacity after it had died away in the rest 
of the empire, possibly from national pride 
and the fidelity to their own customs that 
was their striking characteristic. Their 
heresy distinguished them from the Romans 



118 THE CHURCH OF 

whom they hated and despised, and gave them 
the chance of plundering the churches of the 
orthodox. Some, however, as the Franks and 
the tribes which conquered Britain, clung to 
their old belief in the gods of Valhalla. If 
the civilization of the world was not to perish 
utterly, it was necessary that the heathen 
should be converted and the heretics re- 
claimed ; and the Church set itself to the task 
with a missionary zeal that bore great fruit 
for the coming ages. Not everywhere was it 
successful : the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths 
remained Arians to the last, and were swept 
away by the arms of Belisarius and Narses, 
A. d. the generals of the great Jus- 
535-555. tinian ; but the Visigoths in Spain 
and the Lombards in Italy, after long strug- 
gles, embraced the Catholic faith and en- 
tered into communion with the see of Eome, 
which thus became more and more the centre 
of western Christianity. The conversion of 
the heathen nations was still more significant. 
The savage Franks, in the midst of their 
A. d. career of conquest, espoused Chris- 
496# tianity and took the form of faith 



WESTERN EUROPE. 119 

and discipline that their Gallic subjects taught 
them, and were welcomed at once as Catho- 
lic champions against the Visigoths and Bur- 
gundians, whose heresy they proceeded to 
extirpate with fire and sword. Assisted by 
the sympathy of the Church, they won the 
mastery of Gaul and became the greatest 
power in western Europe, while the Church 
by their help rose in power and importance. 
It is needless to say that the Christianity 
of these early Frankish chieftains was 
of a kind that left much to be desired. 
They were cruel, perfidious, and avaricious. 
The kings had their harems of wives and 
concubines; every sort of violence and 
outrage was common, and, if punished, the 
punishment was usually a greater outrage 
than the original crime. Yet, in spite of all 
this, their acceptance of Christianity made a 
vast difference, if not to the first generation, 
at least to their successors. They were now 
in the road to learning, to civilization, to 
advancement. Rudimentary as their Chris- 
tianity was, it contained vital germs which 
could and would develop into a glo- 



120 THE CHURCH OF 

rious life. It had the promise of a 
future, which their pagan faith could never 
have. 

The Franks knew nothing, of course, of 
ecclesiastical history or of former controver- 
sies, and were ready to accept what their 
teachers told them ; and in this way claims 
of freedom from the control of the secular 
power, and of the supremacy of the Eoman 
bishop, which better instructed imperial offi- 
cials might have rejected, were received 
without question by the fur-clad kings, who 
now began to masquerade in tunic and 
pallium. A strange life indeed was that of 
the world in the sixth and seventh centu- 
ries ; ancient traditions, imperial law, savage 
customs, ecclesiastical precedents, municipal 
liberties, all mixed up in bewildering con- 
fusion ; yet through it all we can discern 
one leading fact, that the only power that 
was strong enough and brave enough to re- 
strain in any degree the brutal selfishness of 
the lords of the land, or to defend and plead 
for righteousness and justice, was the Church 
of Christ. It surely is not amazing that, in 



WESTERN EUROPE. 121 

the midst of such difficulty and danger, the 
isolated churches in the barbarian kingdoms 
should have sought to strengthen their own 
position by drawing closer and closer to the 
Eoman See. 

Our own forefathers in England were still 
more savage than the Franks. They obliter- 
ated the old Christian civilization in the 
greater part of Britain, and drove the 
Britons who had refused to submit to them 
into the mountains and moors of Wales and 
Cornwall. Churches were destroyed, priests 
slain at the altar, the worship of Woden and 
Thor and Freya supplanted that of the 
Christian's God. For a century, in the con- 
vulsions that racked the whole of western 
Europe, Britain and its woes were lost sight 
of ; but when at last the condition of Chris- 
tian Europe became settled enough to allow 
men to think of other miseries than those 
immediately around them, the devout shud- 
dered to think that a land, once consecrated 
to the worship of the Almighty, should be 
given over to savagery and paganism. There 
was no chance that England would receive 



122 THE CHURCH OF 

Christianity from the conquered people, as 
had been the case in Gaul. The two races 
were bitterly hostile ; the English had no 
desire to be taught by the Welsh whom they 
looked down upon, and the Welsh Christians, 
in their turn, rather rejoiced at the thought 
that in a future life they might hope to see 
their successful oppressors burning in hell. 
Teutonic England was to receive its Chris- 
tianity from without ; to learn the truths of 
the Gospel, as the first heathen had learned 
them, from devoted missionaries, not to take 
them as a part of the civilization of the con- 
quered people among whom they dwelt. The 
mission of Augustine to England marks the 
beginning of modern missionary enterprise, 
and was undertaken as a work of faith by 
the wise and holy Gregory I. of Rome. It 
was an enterprise of danger and devotion ; 
when the missionary party were half-way to 
their destination, their hearts failed them, 
and they sent to the Pope to beg that he 
would release them from their perilous under- 
taking. Our ancestors bore a bad character 
for cruelty, and the Italian monks whom 



WESTERN EUROPE. 123 

Gregory had chosen shrank not unnaturally 
from the unknown terrors of the strange 
land and the rude barbarians among whom 
their work would lie. But Gregory would 
hear of no drawing back, and encouraged 
them to persevere, and their success was 
remarkable. Kent, at that time ^jq # 
the most powerful of the kingdoms 595, 
in England, soon yielded to their efforts ; and 
Augustine was created by the Pope archbishop 
and metropolitan, the first new bishop and 
metropolitan since the imperial organization 
had fallen in the West. 

But it was not to the Roman missionaries 
alone that the conversion of the English 
was due. Their work was confined at first 
to the southern portion of the island, and 
was not entirely successful there, as a 
heathen reaction took place after the death 
of Augustine, that almost wiped out the new 
Christianity. The north and centre of Eng- 
land, with the Scottish lowlands, were led to 
the Gospel by the loving labors of monks 
from Iona, the disciples of the apostolic 
Columba, who had brought with him from 



124 THE CHURCH OF 

Ireland the old traditions of the Church in the 
sister island. Questions soon arose between 
the missionaries of the two schools. One 
side represented the fresh vigorous Chris- 
tianity of the new Europe that was springing 
into life ; the other, though identical in all 
the essentials of the faith, clung with an af- 
fection that was almost schismatic to a few 
local peculiarities which they exalted into 
matters of principle. The clergy of the 
northern obedience have frequently been 
represented as resisting heroically the inter- 
ference and intrusion of the Eoman see. 
They deserve no such credit. They did in- 
deed contend with it, and with the men who 
respected it so much that they had little 
patience with those who differed from them, 
but their resistance sprang not so much from 
any deep principle of ecclesiastical independ- 
ence as from a desire to perpetuate the tri- 
fling differences which they preferred to the 
general consent of western Christendom. 
They were fortunately compelled to yield, 
and English Christianity came gladly and 
readily into full and close communion with 



WESTERN EUROPE. 125 

the great see of Rome, from whence Eng- 
lish people had first received the A. D. 
Gospel. The harmonizing of the 664 - 
different sections of the Church was the 
work largely of Theodore of Tarsus, who 
became archbishop in 668, and united and or- 
ganized the scattered missionary centres 
into a strong and well-ordered society, 
which by its unity and efficiency gave to the 
discordant secular bodies a living example 
of the advantages of union and organiza- 
tion. The conversion of England added 
much to the prestige of the Papacy. It was 
the first conquest of a purely heathen land, 
and the English were grateful converts. 
Soon, from the newly rescued island, mission- 
aries were on their way back to Friesland, 
to men nearly akin to them in race, and 
even to the wilder heathen Franconians and 
Thuringians on the eastern side of the 
Rhine. 

They carried the gospel, and with it respect 
for the Roman see and the centralized system 
of the Church ; and soon the Northumbrian 
Winfrith became Boniface, the apostle of the 



126 THE CHURCH OF 

Germans, the great archbishop of Mayence. 
Thus England and Germany, brought from 
darkness to light, both served to enhance 
the importance and authority of the Pope. 
Their conversion had been mainly due to 
the Papacy, and they repaid it with their 
heartiest support against the disintegrating 
tendencies of the nascent feudalism which 
was beginning to develop itself among the 
Franks and Burgundians. One step more 
followed in the same sequence. Boniface, 
the English missionary, led the Fraiikish 
chieftain Pippin to seek, in a critical period, 
from the Church and the Pope, the help he 
needed for the political revolution that he con- 
templated ; and thus a new Frankish dynasty 
was established in Gaul, more thoroughly 
Teutonic in blood and in thought than that 
which it supplanted, powerful enough to 
check disintegration, and committed to the 
A. D. support of the papal see. The new 
752. kingdom became great and power- 
ful ; and then the popes conceived the idea 
of a still greater revolution, to throw off the 
shadowy bands that yet held them to the dis- 



WESTERN EUROPE. 127 

tant and decaying Eastern power, and to 
place a German prince, devoted to their 
cause, upon the throne of the Caesars. 
In this way, they reasoned, the ancient 
imperial character of the Church would be 
restored, and the grateful barbarians would 
recognize and support the authority of 
the great potentate from whom they would 
have received the diadem. Charles, or 
Charlemagne (to give him the name by 
which the world has usually known him), 
the great and victorious king of the 
Franks, the unquestioned master of the 
greater part of Europe, the friend and bene- 
factor of the Holy See, was solemnly crowned 
at Eome, ' ■ the Mother of Empire," on Christ- 
mas day in the year 800, and men fancied 
that the rule of the Caesars was restored, 
never again to be interrupted. a. D. 
Once more the world had come 800. 
back to its natural order, and now, with 
an emperor to be the secular head of 
Church and world and the Pope to be the 
spiritual head, all would go well. The 
mediaeval idea of this joint rulership was, 



128 THE CHURCH OF 

that the world was committed to the care of 
two chosen vicegerents of God : the emperor 
to rule in secular affairs, and the Pope in 
spiritual affairs. In the ecclesiastical con- 
ception of the relation between the two 
powers, it was held that as the sun is greater 
than the moon, so is the Pope greater than 
the emperor ; as man's soul is higher than 
his body, so is the ecclesiastical rule higher 
and holier than the secular. But, unfortu- 
nately for the ecclesiastics, the new emperor 
took his new position with a most serious 
sense of its responsibilities and duties, and 
treated his office as a gift from God, a solemn 
trust in which he could have no partner nor 
associate. Full of reverence and respect for 
the Pope and the papal office, he yet never 
yielded any authority or precedence to him, 
and the Papacy discovered that it had created 
for itself a master, rather than an agent. 
Yet, none the less true had been the instinct 
which had led it to revive the empire, for 
the new imperial organization, with its cen- 
tralized system, developed in the growing 
consciousness of Europe a sense of its natural 



WESTEBN EUBOPE. 129 

unity, which had been obscured, if not utterly- 
lost, in the chaotic centuries which had elapsed 
since the last Caesar laid aside the robe and 
the sceptre ; and, moreover, the conception 
of the Roman Church, as the church of 
the Roman empire was clear, distinct, and 
intelligible. 

The triumph of the Papacy was deferred. 
Charlemagne allowed none to be master but 
himself, and after his death a second period 
of confusion followed, which broke up the 
new-found unity of the empire and prevented 
it from ever becoming an universal govern- 
ment of Europe. A succession of able popes 
for nearly a century enabled the Papacy 
to make capital out of the dissension and 
weakness of the State, but it also caught 
the spirit of the age and, with the growth of 
feudalism and the triumph of individualism 
in Church and State, it declined. The fatal 
gift of the temporal power corrupted its mo- 
tives and debased its ideals ; not only did it 
lose its power and authority, but it degene- 
rated in piety and morals. Men of abandoned 

lives were shamelessly raised to the papal 
9 



130 THE CHURCH OF 

throne, and, while their claims were pushed 
with a zeal that surpassed all former efforts, 
the world was scandalized to see one who 
called himself Christ's representative on 
earth, a worthless reprobate. The forged 
decretals, which appeared in this period, 
seem to have been drawn up as weapons 
against the recalcitrant secular princes, and 
though frequently disregarded they were 
never withdrawn ; once put in circulation, 
there was no critical skill that could expose 
them, and each new forgery was used as a 
source from which most sweeping deductions 
could be drawn. When codified by Gratian 
in the tenth century, these forgeries, together 
with a nucleus of genuine letters of early 
popes, formed the body of the canon law of 
the Church. 

After more than a century of confusion, 
rendered still more confused by the continued 
assaults of Norsemen and Saracens, some- 
thing that approximated to a settled condition 
of society was at last evolved, though it was 
only the armed truce, and legalized anarchy, 
that we know as the Feudal System ; with 



WESTERN EUROPE. 131 

the settling of society came also a desire for 
reform in religion. Monasteries were re- 
formed ; new and stricter orders were estab- 
lished ; men began to go upon pilgrimages 
to holy places in the hope of atoning for the 
many sins of violence they committed at 
home ; throughout Europe there was a re- 
markable awakening of the religious con- 
sciousness. This has sometimes been attrib- 
uted to the existence of a superstitious belief 
that the world was to come to an end at the 
thousandth year from the birth of Christ, 
but there is no sufficient proof that this was 
a general belief, and the revival may be 
accounted for by the working of simpler and 
more rational causes. The world had been 
struggling for order and for peace ; and when 
in the tenth century some little improvement 
was visible, the Church made use of the first 
signs of a better spirit, to push onward with 
renewed strength the battle for righteous- 
ness and holiness of life which it had always 
maintained, even in the midst of the fiercest 
disorder. 

Rome, which had sunk the lowest, was 



132 THE CHURCH OF 

the last place to be reached by the wave of 
reform ; but finally the vigorous German 
princes who had revived the imperial power 
and name in Germany and Italy, were able to 
cleanse out the abominations at which all 
Christendom was disgusted, and to restore 
the papal see to decency and influence once 
more. In an amazing manner, which proved 
the power yet exercised by the mystic name 
of Rome, it regained speedily its ascendancy, 
and gathered into its hands the leadership in 
the work of reform, taking the movement 
away from the laymen and pushing it to 
lengths undreamed of. 

The creator of the mediaeval Papacy was 
the celebrated Hildebrand, one of the most 
remarkable men that ever lived. In a sub- 
ordinate station he ruled and guided the 
policy of the Holy See for years before he 
himself was elevated to the pontificate by the 
A> D # name of Gregory VII. ; and when 

1073-1085. ke at last assumed the triple crown, 
he boldly set himself to the work of making 
the Papacy the supreme authority in the 
world. His efforts were especially devoted 



WESTERN EUROPE, 138 

towards the attainment of two objects 
closely connected with each other : — 

1. To reform all existing abuses in the 
Church by the authority of the Eoman see ; 

2. By means of the reform, to put the 
Church at the head of all the true life of 
Europe. 

Chief among the abuses at which he struck 
was the marriage of the clergy. This prac- 
tice, which had become common both secretly 
and openly, he considered not merely unlaw- 
ful, but a fearful and sacrilegious sin ; and 
he probably also saw what power the Church 
would gain if her clergy were celibates, sepa- 
rated from the world by the renunciation of 
the common ties of life, and devoted as a 
class to the one all-absorbing object of ad- 
vancing the Church's cause. With an un- 
married clergy there was no danger of the 
priesthood sinking into the condition of an 
hereditary caste ; on the contrary, it would 
need to be continually recruited from with- 
out with the best blood of the laity, and thus 
a constant and vital connection would be 
kept up with all conditions of society. The 



134 THE CHURCH OF 

peasant, the burgher, the noble, all would be 
drawn close to the Church in which their 
sons devoted and consecrated their lives to 
holy offices. 

Such a body as this would lend itself to 
organization, and the Pope believed that to 
secure the rule of morality and order on 
earth the Church must rule, and to secure 
the Church's rule its organization must be 
strongly centralized. As Guizot points out 
in his brilliant lecture upon this period, Hilde- 
brand committed two great tactical errors : 
he laid out more work than it was possible 
for any man to accomplish ; and he pro- 
claimed too loudly his intentions and desires. 
Both of these, it will be noticed, are the 
faults of an honest enthusiast who, strong 
in his personal conviction of the righteous- 
ness of his cause, considered concealment of 
his purposes or moderation in his desires a 
want of faith in the triumph of God. His 
measures soon brought him into conflict with 
the emperor, and long and eventful was the 
battle of giants. At one time, the lord of 
the world, as men deemed him, was obliged 



WESTERN EUROPE. 135 

to stand in the garb of a penitent in the snow- 
covered courtyard of an Apennine castle, 
until the Pope was willing to take pity on 
his humiliation and to admit him to his pres- 
ence to make there his abject submission. 
Again, the world saw with horror the sacred 
city stormed and sacked, first by the German 
troops of the emperor, and then by savage 
Norman supporters of the Pope. The em- 
peror, deserted by his friends and betrayed 
by his own children, rested at last in an un- 
blessed grave, while Gregory was driven from 
Kome to Salerno, and passed away with the 
sad words on his lips : "I have loved right- 
eousness and hated iniquity, therefore I die 
in exile." The quarrel continued to rage be- 
tween their successors, and though on minor 
points a compromise was reached which en- 
abled each side to claim a victory, yet the 
solid fruits of success fell to the popes, who 
had generally represented the cause of order 
and justice, as opposed to the arbitrary wil- 
fulness and selfish tyranny of the temporal 
rulers. 
The Crusades, which were at once a direct 



136 THE CHURCH OF 

result of the religious revival of the period 
and also of the more settled social condition 
of Europe, served greatly to increase the 
power and authority of the popes. They 
were holy wars, undertaken at the bidding of 
the Church, and under the special benediction 
of the Papacy. The legates of the Pope rep- 
resented him among the leaders in the field. 
He was the advocate and protector of the es- 
tates and families which the warriors of the 
Cross left behind them, when they journeyed 
to reconquer for Christianity the sacred soil of 
Palestine. The religious enthusiasm which 
these romantic enterprises inspired was skil- 
fully worked upon by the papal court for its 
own advantage, so that before the Crusades 
were ended the Pope was beyond all question 
the mightiest of all European powers, ready 
to give law to king or emperor and able to en- 
force his decrees by the terror of his spiritual 
censures. Kingdoms were laid under in- 
terdict for the faults of their rulers ; mon- 
archs who would not listen were chastised 
into submission. One king of England was 
driven to expiate his offences by kneeling 



WESTERN EUROPE. 137 

humbly to receive on his naked back the 
blows of scourges wielded by exultant priests; 
another was compelled to surrender his crown 
into the hand of the Pope's ambassador and 
to declare himself the vassal of St. Peter. 
In the pontificate of Innocent III. a. D. 
the Papacy reached the summit of 1198 - 1316 « 
its power and authority. It humbled John of 
England and Philip Augustus of France, and 
saw the overthrow of the schismatical Greek 
empire at Constantinople and the establish- 
ment there of an emperor and a patriarch of 
the Latin obedience. Never before had mortal 
man achieved, or even aspired to, so high and 
so awful an office. Supreme above all earthly 
potentates, head of the Church on earth, vicar 
of Christ and vicegerent of God — such a posi- 
tion required indeed omniscience and infalli- 
bility. No fallible man, subject to the usual 
conditions of humanity, was fit for such an 
elevation ; and keen logicians, boldly seizing 
the horn of the dilemma, began to assert that 
the Pope must be infallible. 

Many circumstances had combined to make 
the papal power so tremendous. All the 



138 THE CHURCH OF 

learning and science of the day was in the 
hands of the clergy ; they alone possessed the 
keys of knowledge, as they held the more 
threatening keys of discipline. The Church 
had advanced while the State had stood still 
or had been engaged in destructive and 
suicidal conflicts ; and in the midst of the 
struggle of the time, the clergy felt that in 
honoring and supporting the Pope they were 
honoring and sustaining the cause of right, 
of justice, of enlightenment, and of progress, 
as well as maintaining their own positions. 

The Church attracted all the men of intel- 
lect and mental power, who were not con- 
demned by their birth to be secular princes, 
and she welcomed these when, weary with 
struggle and defeat, they threw aside the 
helmet for the cowl, the sword for the cruci- 
fix, and entered into some monastery to end 
their days in peace and holiness. The new 
universities which were beginning to spring 
into life were at this time not only strongly 
ecclesiastical, but especially devoted to the 
Pope, as being able to free them from the 
interference of the local authorities. The 



WESTERN EUROPE. 139 

new mendicant orders, Franciscan and Do- 
minican, were preaching the gospel of life to 
the poor as it had not been preached for ages, 
building up thus a conscious and intelligent 
populace in place of the serfs and hinds who, 
little better than beasts, had tilled their mas- 
ters' fields ; and these were bound by closest 
ties of loyalty and affection to the popes from 
whom they had derived their privileges, and 
became their militia and recruiting officers 
for their cause in every land. The Papacy 
had made a bold stroke for power, wonderful 
in that age in its statesmanlike sagacity. 
It humbled the exalted and exalted the 
humble. It made war upon kings and princes, 
and was able to compel their unwilling sub- 
mission because it had upon its side the great 
mass of the people in every land of Europe. 
The one office that was above all worldly 
offices was one that might be attained by any 
baptized man. Thus the democratic char- 
acter of the Church of the middle ages was 
the secret of its strength. When it declined 
from this, when it lost the purity of its ideals, 
and sought shamelessly for gold and power 



140 THE CHUBCH OF 

and territory, after the fashion of the princes 
of the world, then it became as one of them 
in its actions as in its desires ; and its fall 
from its high estate was rapid and irrevo- 
cable. 

The Papacy had said in its heart, as did 
the proud king of the ancient Babylon, "I 
will exalt my throne above the stars of God, 
I will ascend above the heights of the cloud, 
I will be like the Most High." The punish- 
ment of Lucifer followed, and the period of 
unequalled majesty and glory was followed 
by dishonor, shame, and disrepute. 

As many causes had combined to place the 
Papacy upon its pinnacle of power, so many 
combined to drag it down when that power 
was misused. It paid the penalty of too 
ambitious an aim ; to sustain the ideal which 
had presented itself to the eyes of a Hilde- 
brand or an Urban, it had exalted itself be- 
yond the capacity of man ; and when the ideal 
was lowered, and human greed for gold and 
fame substituted for the nobler ambitions 
for the glory of God and the spread of His 
kingdom, it fell before the inevitable rebellion 



WESTERN EUROPE. 141 

of right thinking men, who recognized that 
its eye had been turned from heaven to the 
things of earth. The men of the middle ages 
would have supported the Papacy if it had 
been true to itself ; its fall was its own work. 
In still another way had the popes pre- 
pared their own downfall. They had humbled 
and weakened the empire, and by so doing 
they had weakened themselves ; for the new 
nations that were rising into prominence 
cared as little for religious as for political 
unity. With a strongly united Europe, a 
centralized Church under a spiritual emperor 
at Eome was an easy and natural concep- 
tion. To an Europe made up of discordant 
and jealous nationalities, the task of preserv- 
ing an ecclesiastical unity was too difficult. 
Revolution was sure to come, and the break- 
up of the unity of western Christendom 
was assured from the time when the Papacy 
first fell from its high position, in the begin- 
ning of the fourteenth century, though the 
law of inertia and the popular conservatism 
prevented any actual separation for over two 
hundred years. 



142 THE CHURCH OF 

Again, the partisans of the secular power, 
in the contest which broke out in the thir- 
teenth century, were no longer unlearned 
as their forerunners had been in the eleventh. 
The old Civil Law of Justinian, with its 
sharp distinctions and purely intellectual 
conclusions, had been unearthed ; and its 
precepts, imperial as they were, framed for 
an utterly different society, were applied by 
the jurists to each half barbarous king, and 
every possible logical consequence deduced 
to the advantage of the secular power. The 
universities, unmindful of the Papacy's claim 
to their gratitude, were fast becoming secu- 
larized and the home of a sceptical philoso- 
phy. The very Franciscans and Dominicans 
were not always to be relied upon. The 
world, thanks to the more fixed condition of 
society, was growing in wealth and in know- 
ledge. Learning was extending to the laity, 
and the methods of ecclesiastical govern- 
ment and administration, which had been a 
support to civilization in its earlier struggles, 
now became fetters and shackles for the ex- 
panding life of modern Europe. 



WESTERN EUROPE. 143 

One by one, the new nations, which, now 
the empire had been humiliated, were the 
leading powers in Europe, turned against 
the papal tyranny, and compelled it to ex- 
ercise its dominion with moderation, as the 
only condition on which it could be allowed 
any authority at all. Saints, like Louis of 
France, and stern warriors, like the Edwards 
of England, were alike in checking the papal 
ambition and regulating its relations with 
their clergy and people. England, the vas- 
sal kingdom of the Papacy, not merely 
threw off all feudal allegiance, but, by the 
statutes of Provisors and Prcernunire, for- 
bade the exercise of any papal jurisdiction 
in England without the king's consent. 

When Boniface VIII. in his quarrel with 
the godless and faithless Philip the Fair of 
France, attempted to wield the thunderbolts 
of Innocent and Gregory, he found them 
powerless in his hands ; and the world saw 
with indifference the imprisonment and death 
of the pontiff. Then followed A d 
that period of humiliation in the 1303 * 
annals of the Papacy, which is commonly 



144 THE CHURCH OF 

known by the name of the " Babylonish 
Captivity/ 5 when, for seventy years, the 
popes were compelled to dwell at Avignon, 
within easy reach of the king of France and 
his forces, and obliged to submit to all his 
commands. When at last they freed them- 
selves and returned to Rome, the Great 
At D # Schism broke out ; and Christendom 
1378. was shocked and scandalized at the 
sight of two, and at one time three popes, 
each claiming to be the only genuine vice- 
gerent of God and cursing and excommuni- 
cating his opponents and their adherents. 
The religious consciousness of Europe rose in 
indignation, and a series of so-called general 
councils attempted to restore peace and 
order. These councils ended the schism, but, 
unfortunately, their members could not free 
themselves from the idea of the necessary 
existence and authority of the Papacy ; their 
efforts only tended to lift it from the pro- 
strate condition in which it lay, and to give it 
a fresh lease of life. Reform in the Church 
was prevented, and the same abuses which 
had scandalized right feeling men continued, 



WESTERN EUROPE. 145 

and were supported by the popes, who now 
sunk to the level of Italian princes, existing 
by the toleration of Europe, which desired 
an infallible spiritual head, but was careless 
and indifferent as to his private vices so long 
as his election and consecration was regular. 
Shamelessness of life, unblushing simony 
and nepotism, characterized the rehabilitated 
Papacy, until in Alexander VI. (Borgia) and 
in Julius II. it seemed to have sunk so low 
as to lose all claim to the respect of Christian 
people. Still, the institution was a venerable 
one, and men could not see, as yet, that the 
Church could safely dispense with it as a 
visible centre and mark of unity. All at- 
tempts at peaceful reform failed. The coun- 
cils had failed ; the secular princes failed 
when they tried to effect reform by their 
edicts and pragmatic sanctions. The court 
of Eome was far too clever for them, and 
their well-meant attempts came to nothing. 
Bolder spirits, like Wiclif in England and 
Huss in Bohemia, attempted reform by popu- 
lar movements, unsupported by either sec- 
ular or ecclesiastical authority ; but the one 



146 THE CHURCH OF 

was silenced, and the other burned at the 
stake as a heretic. The Eenaissance came 
with new intellectual life and new light, but 
throwing a deceitful glamour over the beau- 
ties of the ancient paganism. Scepticism and 
unbelief were rampant among the laity and 
the clergy as well. The Church, as a whole, 
set itself against the new learning, and it 
seemed as if the brilliant thought of the new 
age was destined to develop entirely apart 
from religion. The Church was in danger of 
utter destruction ; it was losing its grasp 
upon the intellects and consciences of men. 
Keform in head and in members was indis- 
pensable if it were ever again to speak in the 
name of Christ to the world. 

Such a condition of the Church, when all 
men were growing daily in knowledge and 
intelligence, was unendurable, especially to 
the few who were advancing also in devotion 
and true religion, who were applying the 
new light to the old problems, and were 
learning, from the revived study of the word 
of God, what were indeed the essential 
truths of Christianity. Reform was refused, 



WESTEBN EUROPE. 147 

abuses continued ; those who spoke against 
them were persecuted ; at last, the natural 
consequence of this repression followed, and 
produced in the sixteenth century that 
great revolution against the whole mediaeval 
system of thought and discipline, that we 
call the Protestant Reformation. 

The Hebrew story tells that when Baal 
worship seemed to have rooted out the wor- 
ship of Jehovah from the land of Israel, and 
all resistance to have perished, the Lord re- 
vealed to the prophet, who deemed himself 
the only one left true to the old faith, that 
He had yet reserved Him seven thousand 
men, who had not bowed the knee nor kissed 
the image. In like manner, in spite of the 
corruption of the papal court and the fright- 
ful immorality of the monasteries, the scep- 
ticism of the learned and the superstition of 
the ignorant, there were always men who 
were quietly doing the work of God, who 
were praying earnestly, and preaching plain 
and simple truths, who were finding help in 
the sacraments and blessing from the word 
of God. 



148 TEE CHUBCH OF 

There was never a time when the comforts 
of religion were not, to some at least, the 
joy of youth, the stay of manhood, the con- 
solation of infirmity, the hope in death. The 
sacraments still, in spite of all superstition 
in regard to them, were ever telling of the 
Father's forgiveness and of the Saviour's love, 
and men were taught to look up and away 
from the sufferings of this present world to 
a future glory. A history might be written, 
that should contain only the record of pro- 
gress and advance ; and when we praise, as 
it is right we should, the men who were bold 
enough to break with the tyrannical system 
that had grown up around religion, and 
to reform the shocking abuses which the 
evil passions of men had brought into the 
Church, we should remember that they owed 
their religious training to men who had 
gone before them, and that they had been 
fitted for their great and important work 
in the mediaeval Church that they reformed. 
" Vixerunt fortes ante Agamernnona" 
There were devout and earnest Christians 
before Luther or Calvin, Cranmer or Ridley; 



WESTERN EUROPE. 149 

the"Grospel" was not a discovery of the 
Protestant Reformation. 

Thus, step by step, by gradual evolution, 
shaped slowly by changing age and circum- 
stance, the Christian Church advanced in its 
path of progress. Ecclesiastical rivalry and 
ambition raised the Papacy at the very time 
when it was needed to render the organiza- 
tion of the Church adequate for the conversion 
and civilization of barbarian Europe. The 
barbarian nations, in their turn, grateful for 
the teaching they had received, raised him 
who had taught them to the loftiest position 
mortal man has ever held. When, intoxi- 
cated with power, the popes abused their 
awful office, the eyes of men were opened to 
see how slight was the basis on which the 
tremendous edifice was reared ; and the same 
Teutonic peoples whom the Papacy had 
trained, and whose support had made the 
papal power supreme, now cast it down from 
the throne it had usurped. The revival of 
religion in the eleventh century had raised 
the Pope to be in reality the ruler of west- 
ern Christendom. It remained for the 



150 THE CHURCH OF WESTERN EUROPE. 

revival of religion in the sixteenth century 
to sweep away the remnants of a power that 
had become an anachronism, and to recon- 
struct an ecclesiastical system on a truer and 
more liberal basis. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE REFORMATION IN WESTERN EUROPE. 




LECTURE IV. 

THE REFORMATION IN WESTERN EUROPE. 

There is an old Jewish proverb with which 
the members of that marvellous race have 
comforted themselves in many a period of 
oppression : " When the tale of bricks is 
doubled, then comes Moses." It expresses 
the common belief in the justice of Provi- 
dence and in the righteousness of the divine 
government of the world. Abominable evil 
will work out its own destruction, unlawful 
tyranny is sure to bring about its own down- 
fall. God is not always upon the side of the 
strongest battalions. Humanity in the long 
run thinks and reasons rightly, and may be 
trusted not to acquiesce forever in what its 
consciousness shows is false. 



154 THE REFORM A TION 

In the fifteenth century it seemed, indeed, 
as if evil had gained the victory both in 
Church and State, in the countries of 
western Europe. In the State, the old ideas 
that had ennobled feudalism, ideas of rights 
and duties, of sacred responsibility and as 
sacred fidelity, had lost their force, and had 
been supplanted by a new set of conceptions, 
more practical perhaps, and more suited for 
the exigency of the times, but certainly of a 
lower grade of moral altitude. Expediency 
had taken the place of duty, self-interest that 
of loyalty. New nations had come into being 
full of these new ideas, made up of new 
men. Commerce, manufactures, and art 
were growing, and with them a new class 
engrossed in them, and placing in them the 
highest good ; the mercantile spirit was 
crowding out the chivalric and religious ; 
actions were estimated by their profitableness 
rather than by their excellence. The old 
restraints on the royal power were passing 
away in every land of Europe ; great kings 
had grown up who plunged their people into 
the horrors of dynastic wars, and were sup- 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 155 

ported by the new classes that were rising 
into power through their wealth, and who 
saw in the widening range of national ex- 
istence wider opportunities for their trade 
and speculation. It is true that the material 
comfort of the well-to-do had wonderfully 
advanced ; the world was richer, busier, 
working more hours a day and more days in 
the week, but the division of the product 
was becoming more and more uneven. The 
old insecurity of the middle ages, when rob- 
ber barons plundered the merchant trains 
along the high roads or harried the cattle of 
the neighboring barony, had indeed been 
removed ; kings and merchants had joined 
hand in hand to put down this disorder and 
had succeeded ; but in place of the oppres- 
sion of the weak by the strong had come the 
no less cruel plundering of the poor by the 
rich. 

The substitution of wages for the older 
servile labor was not entirely the benefit it 
seemed. The serf who rose in the struggle 
for existence and became an employer him- 
self, benefited by the change ; but the peasant 



156 THE BEFOBMATION 

laborer who lost the security that his servile 
tenure had given him, and became merely a 
" hired servant, 55 had little cause for grati- 
tude. Large culture was superseding small ; 
in some parts sheep- raising was supplanting 
agriculture, throwing men out of employ- 
ment and land out of cultivation, cheapening 
the clothing of the rich, increasing the profits 
of the manufacturer and the merchant, but 
raising the price of food. Even soldiers now 
fought for money and not for glory. The 
days of chivalry were ended, the era of the 
hired adventurer, the Landsknecht, the Free 
Companion, had arrived, making war less 
deadly indeed for the combatants, but fear- 
fully fatal for the unfortunate countries 
which were exposed to their brutality and 
rapacity. But along with this there was a 
brighter side. With this growth of material 
wealth and development had come the arts 
of leisure and refinement. Others beside 
the monks now had time for study and re- 
flection. Europe became self-conscious, and 
with the recognition of self came the corre- 
sponding recognition of the external world. 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 157 

Inventions followed one another with a dis- 
tracting rapidity ; learning was encouraged, 
and a new world of thought opened out to 
the minds of men, at the same time and in 
the same manner as the new world beyond 
the ocean opened out its mysterious charms 
to the daring voyagers who had sought it. 
The age was one of unrest and of change. 
A new Europe had come into existence, and 
was trying to reconcile itself with its sur- 
roundings. Its movements were tentative, 
experimental. It felt about like a child 
which tries to grasp all objects that attract 
it, without regarding whether they are 
within reach or not. It is a period of vast 
interest, as it shows us a plastic civilization 
which had not as yet set into permanent and 
durable form. The force that moulded this 
mass into the definite shapes we see to-day 
was the great religious revolution of the 
sixteenth century which we know as the 
Protestant Eeformation. 

With this splendid, brilliant new life of 
Europe, as capable of development but as 
undeveloped as that of a child, the papal 



158 THE REFORMATION 

Church had little sympathy. Its theory was 
fixed, its rules were established. It did not 
recognize progress, advance, or development. 
Its theologians had codified, systematized, 
and arranged all knowledge, divine and hu- 
man, to their own satisfaction, and they did 
not like to see their work undone by the new 
learning that had come into the world in 
spite of their efforts. Their canonists had 
drawn up a body of laws to suit the condi- 
tions of mediaeval Europe, and they were 
not inclined to recognize that Europe had 
ceased to be mediaeval and had become 
modern. The Church's system had been 
organized for converting the heathen and 
teaching the ignorant ; but now the heathen 
were in the Church and not outside of it, 
the ignorant were the teachers and not the 
taught. To the modern age, as it was 
developing before its eyes, the papal system 
uttered its fatal " non possumus" which too 
often repeated brought on the revolution. 

It was the papal system that stopped the 
way of all reform. Had it not been for this, 
it is conceivable that the efforts of those men 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 159 

of the new learning and new thought, who 
were religious as well as enlightened, might 
have been successful in effecting a peaceful 
reformation; but against the power of re- 
sistance which it possessed, the efforts of 
Savonarola, of Colet, and of Erasmus were 
futile. Abuses were maintained because 
they were profitable ; the papal supremacy- 
was insisted upon, even after it had sunk to 
be merely the weapon of the prince of whom 
the Pope happened to be most afraid ; and of 
the time when once rebellion began, and 
men saw that rebellion was possible, Europe 
was convulsed with the sudden uprising of 
men who would endure tyranny and abuses 
no longer. 

We are told by one of the old ecclesiastical 
historians that, in Alexandria at the time 
of the conversion of the empire, there was a 
famous image of the great god Serapis, of 
great antiquity and honor, revered by the 
heathen, dreaded even by the Christians 
who could not free themselves from the su- 
perstitions of their infancy. Its removal was 
ordered by the authorities, but none dared 



160 THE REFORMATION 

lay sacrilegious hands upon it, until at last 
a Eoman soldier, more pious or more scepti- 
cal than the rest, struck it with his axe. It 
fell, and out of it rushed a swarm of rats 
and vermin whose movements had made 
the mysterious sounds which the crowd had 
deemed the warning murmurs of the god. 
All respect then was lost ; the people rushed 
in with a shout, destroyed the idol, and 
cleansed the temple. So, until Luther was 
bold enough to strike his blow at the Papacy, 
none had dared to touch it. When this had 
once been done, men saw that the act was 
easy, and the religious revolution began 
which convulsed Europe for over an hundred 
years and has left western Christendom 
divided and weakened by its division. 

It is impossible not to admire and sym- 
pathize with such men as Colet, More, and 
Erasmus, who sought for peaceful reform 
and fancied that it could be obtained. They 
were more amiable and attractive characters 
than Luther or Calvin or the later English 
reformers, but their idea was utopian. It 
was only possible if men could have been 



IN WESTERN EUROPE, 161 

swayed by reason and not by passion, or if 
all men could have had their purity of ideal 
and singleness of purpose. The condition of 
the modern Roman Church shows us that 
it is possible to sweep away gross abuses 
and scandals, while retaining the Papacy. 
Whether it would have been possible to have 
secured also reform in doctrine and in dis- 
cipline if no violent revolution had occurred, 
is an ineresting hypothetical question, but 
not one that is directly profitable. 

The great causes which produced the 
Reformation were the growth of the new 
national spirit, which made men desire po- 
litical independence and resent the domina- 
tion of the Pope ; the growth of the new 
learning, which made them desire intellec- 
tual independence and cast aside the fetters 
of scholasticism ; and the growth of personal 
religion, which made them desire spiritual 
independence and repudiate the idea of 
priestly mediation. In the face of these, 
the Roman Church attempted to hold rigidly 
to the usurped dominion of the Pope and 
court of Rome ; to the abuse of authority 



1 62 THE REFORM A TION 

by the clergy and the scholastic theologians ; 
and to the corruptions in doctrine and in 
practice; thus antagonizing the three strong- 
est forces of the new life of Europe. 

For a time it seemed as if the forces of con- 
servatism would prove too strong for the 
spirit of reform. The princes preferred in- 
triguing with the Pope against each other, 
to supporting national movements against 
the time-hallowed system of ecclesiastical 
unity. Their selfish aims and desires were 
satisfied so long as they could obtain their 
points and throw the suffering upon their 
people. Few of them were imbued with the 
spirit of nationality, or understood what it 
was that made their position so strong. If 
reformation had had to wait for the princes 
to lead it, it would have been long delayed. 
Again, the new mental life was assuming 
in a great degree a sceptical and irreligious 
character. It mocked at the miracles of the 
monks and ridiculed the syllogisms of the 
scholastics, but put nothing better in their 
place. The Humanists, as the men of the 
new learning were called, cared little for 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 163 

Christianity. They were content to let 
abuses continue, so long as they were undis- 
turbed by them. There was great danger 
that the result of the new learning, if it con- 
tinued in their hands, would be the weaken- 
ing of all religious sanctions. They ridiculed 
the superstitions of the clergy and the un- 
learned, and were teaching men that all 
Christianity was a delusion. Such a move- 
ment as this was powerful to destroy, but 
was not powerful to rebuild. The third re- 
forming cause, the growth of personal re- 
ligion, was the strongest, the purest, and the 
truest, and gave the impulse to the great 
revolution. Closely connected with the new 
learning and with the enthusiasm of na- 
tional patriotism, it was able to blend both 
with itself in a threefold force, opposing 
the threefold tyranny that oppressed the 
world. Personal religion, sincere and true 
devotion to the service of God, had never 
been lost to the world, even in the darkest 
ages. There were always those who, in the 
midst of superstition and error, were pre- 
served by their simple faith in Q-od and their 



164 THE BEFOBMATION 

love and gratitude to the Lord who had 
bought them. There was never a time when 
the abuses were not felt to be abuses by 
a minority, a faithful "remnant," as an 
Isaiah would have called them, "the Israel 
of God," to use St. Paul's adaptation of the 
prophetic phrase. These were the men who 
had saved the religious life of Europe from 
extinction, men who were seldom in high 
place or position, but who, when they were, 
used that power and position manfully to re- 
sist the growing evil. Never, however, had 
their cause appeared less hopeful than in the 
beginning of the sixteenth century. The 
vested interests of the monks and higher 
clergy seemed to oppose a fatal barrier to all 
progress. Yet they had persevered, and had 
made use of the new learning to enable 
themselves and their followers to understand 
the Scriptures and the works of those early 
fathers of the Church who had written be- 
fore the Papacy had arisen. The New Tes- 
tament was re-translated ; the Vulgate was 
revised ; the original Greek of the sacred 
books was edited and printed and furnished 
with commentary and paraphrase. 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 165 

Their efforts were hailed with joy by men 
who were like-minded, and welcomed even 
by the more sceptical Humanists, as weapons 
against the superstition and wilful ignorance 
of the rulers in the Church ; and thus they 
performed the most useful service of stop- 
ping the secularization of thought and of 
consecrating the new learning to the service 
of Christianity. But against them was 
ranged the conservatism of many religious 
men who were unwilling or unable to sacri- 
fice familiar conceptions, and the self-interest 
of the worldly who saw their profits in 
danger if the simpler views and more spiri- 
tual conceptions should win the victory. 

These latter opposed all reform, setting 
themselves firmly against any and all change, 
" loving darkness rather than light because 
their deeds were evil." 

It is hard for us at the present day to real- 
ize the extent of the ecclesiastical tyranny 
that then existed, or the abominable charac- 
ter of the abuses that prevailed. The Church 
in the West was a great united empire of 
which the Pope was the head. Europe was 



166 THE REFORMATION 

divided into ecclesiastical provinces, each 
province into dioceses, and each diocese into 
parishes. Thus a graduated hierarchy was 
formed, closely connected together by bonds 
of discipline and self-interest, from the low- 
est priest in the village church up to the 
Pope on his throne in the Vatican. This 
ecclesiastical empire struggled hard to keep 
itself free of the civil power, and to maintain 
its own courts for the trial of offences con- 
cerning the clergy, with final appeal to 
Rome. The independence of the metropol- 
itans in the various nations was kept in 
check by the presence of papal legates with 
plenary power, who, in spite of the resist- 
ance of secular princes from time to time, 
and in spite of secular legislation, grew more 
and more powerful, subverting the ancient 
authority of the episcopate and teaching 
men to look to Rome as the centre of all ec- 
clesiastical power. Besides this hierarchy of 
the officials of parish and diocese, the whole 
of Europe swarmed with monks and friars 
who were devoted to the papal interest from 
which they had derived their peculiar priv- 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 167 

ileges. For their services to the Papacy, and 
as a means of holding the secular clergy in 
check, they had been indulged with every 
kind of liberty, had been freed from episco- 
pal oversight, and made of much more im- 
portance than those who were more immedi- 
ately engaged in the work of ministering at 
the Church's altars. Originally professing 
poverty, they had amassed wealth to an un- 
limited extent, and had laid field to field un- 
til they had become lords of at least a third 
of the soil of Europe. Professing chastity, 
their monasteries had sunk to be little better 
than brothels where every kind of vice and 
luxury was practiced shamelessly. And it 
was such men as these that controlled and 
ordered the lives of their fellow-men from the 
cradle to the grave. Every action of a man's 
life came under their jurisdiction ; educa- 
tion, religious privileges, marriage, sickness, 
death, burial, the testamentary disposition 
of property — all were in their hands, and all 
were used as a means of extorting money. 
Fees were charged for every act performed ; 
and by playing upon the credulity of the 



168 THE BEFOBMATION 

simple, and by harassing the death-beds of 
the wealthy by the terrors of futurity, de- 
luding the sufferers by their pretended power 
over the pains of purgatory, they gained a 
rich harvest and laid the whole Christian 
world under contribution. Thus the Church 
was far richer than any of the monarchs ; 
but still the clergy were insatiable ; from 
small and great, from begging friar to car- 
dinal, the cry was still, " Give, give," and the 
court of Rome continued to make and au- 
thorize fresh demands with an inexhaustible 
voracity. Such plundering would have been 
a serious matter, even if the money had been 
wisely spent ; but men saw with disgust that, 
instead of being used in advancing the King- 
dom of Christ, it was squandered recklessly, 
in wasteful and destructive wars or in 
shameful and profligate luxury. The won- 
der is, not that the more enlightened part of 
Europe rose in revolt, but that the revolt 
was so long delayed. 

Yet it was but natural that men should 
hesitate long before they struck a blow at 
what represented the authority of religion. 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 169 

The abuses were no new things ; they were 
the growth of centuries, and the theory of 
the papal dominion had become so ingrained 
in the religious conception of western Chris- 
tendom that any rebellion against it as a 
system seemed indeed to be fighting against 
God. The penalties for heresy were fright- 
ful in their vindictiveness, and might well 
have deterred all but those who had the 
spirit of martyrs, and for men of tender con- 
science worse than the fear of the stake 
was the fear of hell. But the evil system 
had strained men's endurance to the utter- 
most. It had refused peaceful reform, it 
had closed its eyes and stopped its ears and 
hardened its heart, until it was too late, and 
the long-deferred explosion came at last, 
lighting a fire of religious hatred which 
raged for over a century and the embers of 
which even now have not done smouldering. 
The explosion came in Germany, from one 
of those monasteries which had been the out 
works of the papal line of defence. Martin 
Luther, a man of the people, a devoted lover 
of his country's independence, a trained 



170 THE REFORMATION 

scholar in the new learning, and an earnest 
and deeply religious man, protested against 
an atrociously coarse and blasphemous at- 
tempt to extort money from the faithful in 
return for pardons and dispensa- a. d. 

tions. The papal court, in indig- 1517 - 

nation at the presumption of this un- 
known monk, attempted the usual mea- 
sures of repression. Luther repaid threat 
by defiance, violence by violence, and soon 
was in open revolt against the Pope's 
authority. Germany was thrown into a 
blaze, and neither Pope nor emperor was 
able to silence the bold preacher or to prevent 
the spread of his ideas. When once authority 
had been defied, and defied with impunity, 
thousands were ready to espouse the reform- 
er's cause. Little by little, the revolution 
spread into neighboring lands, while ra- 
pacious princes and nobles made it an excuse 
for seizing on the wealth of the churches and 
monasteries, and the cause of religious liberty 
was sorely hampered and discredited by the 
mixed multitude which hung upon the skirts 
of the movement. Every disorderly element 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 171 

seemed to wish to ally itself to the Eefor- 
mation; and it was only by the greatest tact 
and skill that the German reformers were 
able to steer their course prudently and to 
rebuild as well as to cast down, to construct 
a new system as well as destroy the old. 

From Germany the reformation spread 
north into Scandinavia, and westward into 
Switzerland and France ; and over all Europe 
men's minds were in a state of wild excitement 
at the changes which followed with alarming 
rapidity. England for some time was un- 
affected by the revolution. It was at this 
period the most priest-ridden of all the lands 
of Europe, and yet, at the same time, there 
was no country, except Italy, where the new 
learning had made greater progress. Its 
monasteries were the richest in Europe, and 
its prelates had been men of mark and mod- 
eration, many of whom, though they con- 
demned the violence and the rebellion of 
Luther were hoping for a peaceful reform. 
The king himself was no mean theologian, 
and was thoroughly in sympathy with Eras- 
mus and Colet in their desire to sweep away 



172 THE REFORMATION 

the abuses that had been allowed to grow 
over the practices of religion. 

For twelve years after the outbreak of 
Luther, England remained strongly upon 
the side of the Pope, and then a personal 
quarrel of the king with the court of Rome 
was the occasion of a conflict with the 
Papacy, which resulted in the English Ref- 
ormation. The Great Parliament was sum- 
moned, and it struck at once at the many 
abuses of the ecclesiastical system under 
which the laity had been groaning for 
A. D. years. The prelates were fright- 
1529. ened into submission, and soon the 
rest of Europe saw with awe a country 
which still professed itself Catholic and 
still condemned the heresy of Luther, throw- 
ing off entirely the yoke of the Papacy and 
assuming the position of an independent 
national church. Rebellion against the na- 
tion's will was dealt with with stern severity ; 
even the saintly More and the courageous 
Bishop Fisher were brought to the block for 
opposing the onward movement of king and 
people. The monks ventured to set them- 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 173 

selves against the will of the liberated nation 
and its haughty monarch ; and they were 
swept away ruthlessly, and their wealth 
thrown into the coffers of the State. 

In Germany personal religion and patriot- 
ism had inspired the revolt. In England 
a movement at first political, was made use 
of to bring about religious reform ; the men 
who removed abuses and declared their inde- 
pendence of the Pope had been inspired by a 
zeal for the Church and State of England, 
but they were not reformers in doctrine, and 
while Henry lived little change was allowed 
from the old forms of faith and worship. 
Yet, little by little, the reformers' doctrines 
were spreading even in England. One could 
not defy the Pope without coming at last to 
distrust the doctrines that the Pope main- 
tained ; and the zeal for political independ- 
ence led soon to a zeal for spiritual independ- 
ence. The great doctrine of the Reformation 
was that of the individual responsibility of 
each man to his Maker, a truth which had 
been obscured by the usurped authority 
of the popes, and by the system and teaching 



174 THE REFORMATION. 

of the Mediaeval Church. It came with the 
force of a revelation, and when once it had 
burned its way into a man's soul it became 
his controlling principle. It made him a free 
man, free from the dictation of priest and 
confessor, free from the fear of purgatory, 
free from the tyranny of a constant espionage 
upon thought and word and action, free from 
the bondage of ordinances that had weighed 
down the soul. 

With the death of Henry VIII. the power 
A. d. fell into the hands of nobles who 
1547. were inclined to the cause of the 
Reformation, and almost at once the new 
doctrines as they were called were recognized 
and made the law of the land. The Prayer 
Book was compiled and published, and its 
use imposed by law. The triumphant re- 
formers abolished the mass, swept images 
from the churches, and thought, as Henry 
had thought before them, that they could 
impose a religion upon the people by force. 
They had no such claim upon the loyalty of 
the people as the king had had ; for, with 
all his tyranny and lust, Henry had been 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 175 

a loyal and patriotic Englishman, and had 
been loved and respected by his people. 
Their measures were disliked, their compul- 
sion resented. The majority of the people 
preferred the old state of things as in the 
reign of Henry, and wished to preserve the 
Catholic religion without the Pope. 

When the young king was hurried to his 
premature death, the revulsion that took 
place seated Mary firmly on the throne, and 
enabled her not only to restore the mass as it 
had been in her father's time, but to recon- 
cile England with the Pope. Had a. d. 
she rested there, England might 1553 " 1558 - 
have been retained by the Papacy and the 
course of the Eef ormation greatly changed ; 
but, with a suicidal conscientiousness, Mary 
felt herself obliged to punish those who had 
been the leaders of the Eeformation in 
Edward's reign, as well as those who ob- 
stinately refused to conform to the Church 
as by law re-established. Her persecution, 
if we compare it with that which took 
place in France and the Netherlands, or even 
in Spain, was moderate. The total number 



176 THE REFORMATION 

of victims was less than three hundred in all. 
But the popular indignation was so great, the 
hatredof persecution undertaken in obedience 
to the will of a foreign power was so strong, 
that the fires of Smithfield and of Oxford 
severed England forever from the Papacy. 
The martyrs went to their death with 
heroic constancy, even Cranmer, who had 
temporized in the hope of saving his life, 
redeeming his character by the steadiness 
and calmness of his behavior at the stake. 
"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley," were 
the words of the aged Latimer as the fag- 
gots were kindled about them in the Can- 
ditch at Oxford. " Play the man : we shall 
this day light such a candle, by God's grace, 
in England, as I trust shall never be put 
out." 

There is a sublimity in the constancy and 
resolution of the early martyrs of the period 
of the Eeformation that, in some respects, is 
greater even than that of those who con- 
tended for their faith against the heathen in 
the early days of Christianity. In the one 
case the choice had been clear and distinct 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 177 

between Christ and the pagan deities ; none 
could yield without apostatizing from Chris- 
tianity. The decision which Cranmer and 
Eidley were called upon to make was be- 
tween different forms of Christianity, and 
they might well have been pardoned if 
they had not felt it was their duty to 
die in defence of opinions that were 
believed to oppose the faith which was then, 
and for generations had been commonly ac- 
cepted in western Christendom. But with 
the deep conviction that no voice of the 
majority could allow them to be false to the 
testimony of their minds and consciences, 
illuminated by the word and spirit of God, 
they "played the man" and, as the servants 
of God have done in every age, "they hum- 
bled their souls unto death, and were num- 
bered with the transgressors," and the next 
generation testified to the work that they 
had done. 

The religious wars which had been threat- 
ening ever since the beginning of the Ee- 
formation, now broke out in Germany and 

deluged the land with blood. The Gospel, 
12 



178 THE REFORMATION 

as in the days of old, brought with it not 
peace but a sword. In Switzerland canton 
strove with canton ; in France persecution at 
once repressed and stimulated the reforming 
movement. In Mary's reign the centre of 
the Reformation was at G-eneva, where Cal- 
vin, an exiled French divine, ruled over his 
theocratic republic with a rod of iron, enun- 
ciating his grim Protestant scholasticism, 
devising and putting into practice a system 
of church government which should be in- 
dependent of the State and powerful enough 
to serve as a form of organization for those 
who had thrown off the old forms of Catholic 
discipline. Beyond all others, Calvin's was 
the constructive mind of the Reformation. 
Luther had swept away the old system, but 
had relied too much upon the State to win a 
true independence for his reformed commun- 
ion. In England the State had hampered 
and interfered from the first. It is true 
that to the State the inception of the move- 
ment was due, but from that time on its 
influence had been only to harm. In Henry's 
reign the cause of the Reformation had been 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 179 

soiled with the lustfulness of the king and 
the rapaciousness of his courtiers. In Ed- 
ward's reign the bishops had been degraded 
into little better than state officials and Eng- 
land had been disgusted with the seculariza- 
tion of religion. In Mary's reign the powers 
of the State had suppressed the faith and 
burned the faithful. But in the ideal of 
Calvin, there rose a Christian body free 
from all state control, purely religious in its 
ends and aims, ready to direct and guide the 
State, but itself a pure theocracy. Not even 
the Church of Rome in her proudest day put 
forth stronger claims to ecclesiastical inde- 
pendence and the ecclesiastical power that 
independence involves, than did this passion- 
less theorist, sharply, keenly logical, merci- 
less in his conclusions. His republicanism 
was a necessary corrective to the too great 
tendency to lean upon an arm of flesh, which 
prevailed elsewhere in the reforming coun- 
tries. 

In theology also Calvin was constructive. 
He was the first great Protestant scholar and 
theologian, a Scripture critic inferior only 



180 THE REFORMATION 

to Erasmus, with a trained scholastic mind, 
able to formulate Christian doctrine in the 
light of the Eeformation, in a manner 
worthy of one of the mediaeval masters. He 
thus rendered Christendom a doubtful serv- 
ice. He furnished an organization strong 
enough to enable the unchurched reformers 
to face the organization of their enemies ; 
he gave to Protestantism a body of positive 
doctrine about which to rally, making it a 
positive faith rather than a protest against 
abuses or a plea for reform ; but in so doing 
he laid the religious thought of the new 
movement under the bondage of a stricter 
and more logical scholasticism than that 
against which the early reformers had pro- 
tested. The Reformation till then had been 
a plea for free-thought. Where Calvinism 
was accepted, the human soul was again 
brought into subjection. But it furnished a 
magnificent fighting discipline and a fighting 
faith, and more perhaps than any other one 
cause prevented the reconciliation of Protest- 
ant countries with the Church of Rome. It 
has leavened all the churches, even those 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 181 

which have not accepted its theories of 
church government, and the spread of its 
doctrines and methods in France, Germany, 
England, Scotland, and America is a testi- 
mony to its strength. It did a great work 
in organizing Protestant thought for the 
great struggle which was yet to come with 
the Papacy. Its weakness lay in its neg- 
lect or rejection of much that was pre- 
cious in the traditions and discipline of the 
past, in its failure to appreciate the value 
of historical continuity, and in its fatalistic 
theology, which, while a form of faith for 
heroes and martyrs, inspiring men to fearless 
daring and to tireless effort, was capable of 
being misused in a way that was subversive 
of morality. Few greater men have ever 
lived than Calvin, if we measure greatness 
by the influence which he has exercised. It 
is, however, an open question whether his 
influence should be reckoned as beneficial. 

Mary of England died in 1558, broken- 
hearted at the failure of her life, having lost 
the hope of children, lost the affection of her 
husband, lost the love of her people, and lost 



182 THE REFORMATION 

even the approval of the Pope. With ring- 
ing of bells and shouts of rejoicing her sister 

A. d. Elizabeth was welcomed to the 
1558-1603. throne. The daughter of Anne 
Boleyn could hardly be a Eomanist ; the 
daughter of Henry VIII. might be trusted 
to have force and decisions of character 
enough to make her wishes known and 
her will respected. 

There was little doubt of the result of her 
succession to the throne, and soon the work 
of Mary's reign was undone and the king- 
dom brought back to the reformed faith. 
The chief opposition to the change was from 
the prelates, but they were silenced and de- 
posed ; a new hierarchy, still connected by 
its orders with the past, but made up of men 
of the new learning and the newly-revived 
ancient faith, took their places ; and the 
Church of England assumed the position and 
character which it has preserved ever since. 
The lawlessness that had characterized the 
reforming movement in Edward's reign was 
repressed. New spirit was put into the old 
organization, and the people of England, 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 183 

with the exception of a small minority, were 
glad to accept the wise and judicious com- 
promise that preserved to them the dignity 
and authority of the ancient church while 
giving them the liberty of the reformed re- 
ligion. 

The weak point in the Church of England 
lay in its connection with the State. Its 
bishops were secular officials, and mingled 
ecclesiastical and secular power in a way that 
did not benefit the State and that caused the 
name of bishop to be abhorred by a growing 
portion of the population. This defect led in 
the next century to civil war, to the tempo- 
rary overthrow and spoliation of the Church, 
and to the separation from its communion of 
many devout and earnest men who had been 
trained in the school of Calvin. 

But the first result of the Elizabethan 
reformation was religious peace and the 
growth in piety and devotion that peace will 
bring. Her accession occurred at a time 
when the condition of Europe was most criti- 
cal. Defeated and discouraged, Charles 
the emperor had resigned his crown and had 



184 THE BEFORMATION. 

betaken himself to the monastery of Yuste, 
and France and Spain had once more been 
involved in war. Hardly had Elizabeth 
ascended the throne when a chance thrust in 
a tournament killed the king of France, and 
placed upon the throne a boy who was mar- 
ried to her most dreaded rival, Mary of Scot- 
land, and who was moreover under the in- 
fluence of the most bigoted of the Roman 
Catholics. The wars in Germany had ceased, 
but the wars in France were about to begin 
and to vex that land for over thirty years. 
In the Netherlands the immortal contest 
was just beginning between Romanism and 
foreign oppression on the one side and Pro- 
testantism and national independence on the 
other. Europe was fast dividing itself into 
hostile camps, and the Pope was, like his pre- 
decessors of old, preaching a crusade against 
those who ventured to dispute his will. 

For a time England was dealt with ten- 
derly, in the hope that a reconciliation might 
be effected, but in 1570 the patience of the 
Pope was exhausted, and the bull of excom- 
munication was issued which declared Eliza- 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 185 

beth deposed and her removal a righteous 
act. From this time on, it was war to the 
knife between the Protestants and the Catho- 
lics. Yet, from one cause and another, the 
final struggle was delayed for eighteen years, 
until England had grown strong and rich 
and united, until a new generation had 
grown up who knew popery mainly by tradi- 
tion or by its evil fruits which were visible in 
the world. When the blow fell England was 
ready for it, and the Invincible Armada, as 
the Spanish fleet was proudly called, was 
boldly met and encountered. A storm, 
which swept the great galleons helplessly 
to the far north of Scotland, completed the 
discomfiture which the English gunners had 
begun, and the shattered fleet struggled 
lamely home with only a third of its original 
strength. " Flavit Jehovah et dissipati 
sunt" was the inscription Elizabeth ordered 
upon the medal that was struck in memory 
of the deliverance ; " This is the Lord's doing 
and it is marvellous in our eyes." "With the 
defeat of the Armada the conflict was ended 
for England. Never again was the Church 



186 THE REFORMATION 

in danger of forcible measures from the 
Eoman party. In France the long and 
cruel religious wars were also approaching 
their end, and in the Netherlands the valor 
and constancy of the Reformers had won vic- 
tory and independence. But in Germany 
long years of struggle were yet to pass in 
which men should murder one another in the 
name of religion, and it was only when the 
country was exhausted with warfare and 
bloodshed that peace was finally made in the 
Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. 

Meanwhile the Church of Rome itself had 
undergone many changes, and had, in a 
sense, been also reformed. The first rapid 
victories of Protestantism had come from the 
earnest faith of the early reformers assault- 
ing the countless abuses of the medieval 
system. As long as Rome was merely on 
the defensive, merely concerned in maintain- 
ing the past, careless of the iniquities which 
that past enshrined, so long its defeat was 
sure and the new life had an easy conquest. 
But when the spirit of devotion and personal 
religion was revived in the ancient Church; 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 187 

when it swept away the worst abuses, and 
set itself to win converts by persuasion rather 
than by repression ; then it recovered its 
strength, and was able to bring back many 
who were tired of the divisions of Protest- 
antism and repelled by the severity of Pro- 
testant theology and practice. It should not 
be forgotten that Eome had her share of 
truth, that her cause was strong with the 
attractiveness of her grand historic system, 
with her claims of unity, and with the burn- 
ing love and enthusiasm of the new Eoman 
missionaries who now rose up to do battle 
for their Church's cause. 

It was a very different thing to contend 
with the obscurantist monks, who loved their 
abuses and worshipped their superstitions, 
than for the men of the second generation to 
hold their own with the eager Jesuits, who 
longed to be martyrs and who brought into 
the controversy minds carefully trained in all 
the learning of their times and hearts full 
of love for the Roman Church and of zeal 
for the promulgation of its doctrine. The 
Papacy in the end of the sixteenth -century 



188 THE REFORMATION 

was far different from what it had been at 
the beginning. It was no longer with care- 
less voluptuaries or with worldly warriors 
that the Protestant churches had to deal, but 
with men of deeply religious character, hard, 
cruel, bigoted, it is true, but men with a defi- 
nite purpose and a clear conception of the 
ends they wished to attain. 

The Council of Trent had been a failure as 
far as promoting peace and unity was con- 
cerned, but it had done for the Roman Catho- 
lics what Calvinism had done for the Pro- 
testants ; it had given them a definite creed 
and a distinct theology. It was the fatal 
answer to the violence of Protestantism, and 
has made reunion an impossibility so long 
as its decrees prevail. All the energies of 
the Papacy were now bent upon recovering 
the ground that had been lost, and with so 
much success that they were able to confine 
Protestantism within much narrower limits 
than it had once possessed, and to reconquer 
much territory that once had seemed to be 
devoted to the Reformation. This would 
have been impossible for the men of the 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 189 

age of Leo X., and was only accomplished 
by the improvement which the Reformation 
had wrought even among those who most 
bitterly opposed it. 

The influence of the Papacy was established 
by the Reformation in the countries that ad- 
hered to its obedience. It had been dropping 
into a decaying senescence when it was 
aroused by the great convulsion. Never 
again did the Pope recover the position held 
by the great popes of the middle ages, as far 
as domination over secular affairs was con- 
cerned ; but as the ecclesiastical head of the 
Roman Catholic church he receives to-day 
greater homage, and his influence is far 
greater, than in the old days before the 
Reformation. 

The surest sign of reviving life and energy 
is in the zeal of spreading the Gospel ; and 
when Protestants rested, weary from their 
conflicts and exertion, the Roman church 
took up the work. Devoted missionaries 
journeyed all over the world and preached 
the word of life to the heathen. India, China, 
Japan, Africa, Paraguay, and the forests of 



190 THE REFORMATION 

Canada, all resounded with the grand war 
cry of the Jesuit, c 'Ad major em Dei gloriam. " 
When at last these too seemed to weary and 
to be corrupted with worldly aims, then Pro- 
testant England in its turn woke up to its 
missionary duty and sent its representatives 
with a simpler faith and at least an equal 
self-devotion. 

In Europe during the latter half of the 
seventeenth century and the first half of the 
eighteenth, a lassitude seemed to fall upon 
religious enterprise. Each party was en- 
gaged in holding the ground that it possessed, 
and preparing itself in quiet and repose for 
fresh endeavors. The Church of England 
had had a stern discipline in the revolt of the 
Puritan party from its obedience. Its un- 
happy connection with the State hampered it 
in its relations with its own members, and it 
was compelled to see some of its most earnest 
and devout children driven into separation 
and schism by the mistakes of those who 
ordered and regulated its action. The Pro- 
testants in France were either suppressed by 
force or driven into exile, and ceased to form 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 191 

an element in the religious life of the country. 
In Germany men were weary with strife and 
only too thankful to be allowed to rest and 
recuperate. But the spirit of the Gospel was 
not dead, and, though too often in contention 
and strife, Christ was preached, the sacra- 
ments administered, and men taught to look 
forward from the evils of this present life to 
the glory that shall be revealed. 

The present century has been the most 
remarkable of the four that have passed 
since the Renaissance, both for the remark- 
able development of the intellectual and 
material energies of Europe and the new 
Europe in America, and also for a corre- 
sponding awakening and quickening of the 
religious life. The great convulsion of the 
French Revolution in the close of the last 
century, "dissolved compounds," to use 
Bacon's phrase, broke up the old conditions 
of affairs, and stimulated the world to fresh 
activity in a way only to be paralleled by the 
earlier religious revolution. Eeligion, which 
seemed somnolent in the eighteenth century, 
has aroused itself to a vigorous and active 



192 THE REFORMATION 

life. No longer content with the promise 
of that only which is to come, it strives to 
realize the profit of godliness in this present 
world, entering into its life, concerning itself 
with social problems, recognizing perhaps 
more fully than in any other age its mission 
to preach the gospel of present comfort and 
deliverance to man. Its missionaries have 
crossed sea and land, and are found in the 
remotest corners of the globe, Eomanist and 
Protestant rivalling one another in their zeal 
in seeking out the lost and bringing them 
to the knowledge of Christ's redemption. 
Charitable organizations at home, the care 
of the poor, the sick, the dying, the abolition 
of slavery in Christian lands, the general 
elevation of the moral standard in every land, 
testify to the wonderful activity which has 
characterized the Church of the West in these 
recent years. God has not suffered man's 
mistakes and follies to destroy his work ; 
rather, we may reverently say, He has made 
use of these very mistakes and follies to 
extend His Kingdom. 
After the fearful contest of the religious 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 193 

wars the Church of Europe had seemed ex- 
hausted, willing to accept its religious divis- 
ions, satisfied if it was able to maintain its 
ground against the growing scepticism of the 
times. It has now recovered its activity, its 
zeal, its love of the souls of men, its spirit of 
progress ; may we not hope that, as this 
blessed life develops more and more in the 
souls of its members, they will come to 
realize " what dangers they are in by their 
unhappy divisions, " that missionary rivalry 
will give way to missionary unity, and that 
thus, little by little, the old divisions may 
be healed, and all Christians may be once 
more joined together in the bond of peace ? 

We have become unfortunately so accus- 
tomed to the divisions of Christendom that, 
in the quiet and ordinary work of the Church, 
they fail to impress themselves upon us as 
they should ; we take them for granted as 
part of the existing order of the world ; but 
when the earnest workers of the rival faiths 
meet, in their holy work, in the slums of our 
great cities or in the plains and marshes of 

the distant heathen lands, religious division 
13 



194 THE REFORMATION. 

assumes a different form, and men learn to 
see how hateful it is, how it hinders the 
Church's work, and causes the enemies of 
God to blaspheme. From earnest missionary- 
activity, from love of the souls of men for 
Christ's sake, the blessed unity will surely 
come. 

And we of the Anglican Communion may 
hope that, as our own Church was led by 
God's providence to take a middle position 
between the opposing extremes at the time 
of the Reformation, it may serve as a point 
of union where men of opposing schools may 
come together hereafter. Preserving as 
we do the historic organization and the 
continuity with the past, and yet, main- 
taining that no church, or priesthood, or 
sacrament can take the place of the direct 
relation between God and each individual 
soul ; we may hold out our hands to 
welcome into Christian fellowship both Ro- 
manist and Protestant. Our liberal and 
broad theology, which shrinks from defining 
too closely the unspeakable mysteries of God, 
has room for Roman, Lutheran, Zwinglian, 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 195 

Calvinist, so long as they leave their anathe- 
mas behind them and bring with them only 
their benedictions. God grant at least that 
no action on our part may seem to hinder or 
delay this blessed possibility. 

What then, may we ask, has the Reforma- 
tion accomplished ? To answer that question 
one only needs to compare the Christian 
Church in the west to-day, with what it was 
before the Reformation. The contrast be- 
tween Leo X. and Leo XIII. is no more 
striking than is the contrast between the 
Roman Church of 1500 and the Roman 
Church to-day, reformed from the worst of 
its superstitions, and overcoming the evil 
effects of those that remain by the earnest- 
ness of its faith and the depth of its love for 
the souls of men. Compare the Church of 
England to-day with the Church that is re- 
vealed to us in the reports of the Great Par- 
liament in 1529, with the Church of Edward's 
reign and its rough iconoclasm, or with that 
of Elizabeth's reign and its subservient 
bishops ; see the work that it, and its 
children of the dissenting bodies, are now 



196 THE REFORMATION 

doing in the world, the zeal for God, the 
enthusiasm for righteousness and mercy. 

Much indeed remains yet to be accom- 
plished ; but no man can fairly read the his- 
tory of the last four hundred years without 
being impressed by the marvellous progress 
which the Christian Church has made in that 
time. There are no four centuries in history, 
except those first great centuries that saw its 
growth from the hundred and twenty to a 
multitude which no man could number, that 
are so rich in the triumphs of grace as are 
those which have elapsed since the Reforma- 
tion. 

Thus we may see how, throughout the 
many ages of its history, the Church of Christ 
has advanced, according to the law of the 
life which was implanted in it in the begin- 
ning. Like the mustard seed, it has grown 
from the smallest beginnings to mighty 
strength by the development of the principle 
of life which was contained in the germ ; like 
the leaven which the woman took and hid 
in the meal, its increase has been in accord- 
ance with the wonderful property by which 



IN WESTERN EUROPE. 197 

even the lowest forms of life are enabled 
to continue and perpetuate their existence. 
Changed though its form may be, varied as 
are the features of its outward appearance, 
it is still the same organism, the same Body, 
as it was in the upper room at the first Pen- 
tecost, one and the same through all the long 
centuries. 

In different ages it has had different 
forms of work to do, and different rates of 
progress. Considered alone, special periods 
may seem retrograde ; but when we view 
them in the light of historical development 
we may read the story of advance, even in 
the times of bitterest struggle, and may 
look hopefully forward to the victories for 
the cause of Christ which the next age 
shall surely see, and confidently onward 
still to the time, of which the eye of faith 
may even now catch the first glimmerings, 
when the kingdom of this world shall be- 
come the kingdom of our God and of His 
Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever. 

THE END, 



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